Donald Trump thinks Haiti and ElSalvador are 'shithole' countries.

[LovingLola]

He is a fucking ignorant bastard.
AIBU??????

[ohfourfoxache]

WTAF?

Where the fuck did that come from, have you got a link?

[ReefAndRiz]

I don't need a link to the latest. There are no words for Trump.

[LovingLola]

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/11/trump-pans-immigration-proposal-as-bringing-people-from-shithole-countries

[LEMtheoriginal]

O m g

[LovingLola]

Have a read of this @julie
www.thenation.com/article/time-for-a-us-apology-to-el-salvador/

[ohfourfoxache]

Head => desk

I have absolutely no words. You just can’t argue with wilful ignorance

[LovingLola]

In fact Julie, google Oscar Romero. Educate yourself.

[KenAdams]

Destroy the West? Fucking hell Julie.

[AdoraBell]

[juliesaway]

Past foreign policy mistakes don’t make it right that there should be a free for all immigration from all countries to the US as penance or guilt. This disproportionately affects the poor and disadvantaged already in the country. Trump has no filter, but rather than the usual frothing, it would be better to acknowledge that e.g Haiti which has had billions and billions in global funding including US support over the years and had been an independent nation for 200 years, is, still, however you look at it, a total mess, and rather than importing an entire 3rd world population to the US, questions should be answered about what best to do to keep people in their countries. it’s a valid question.

[LovingLola]

So it's just fine to refer to them as 'shitholes' then.
Right...

[Kokeshi123]

His language is provocative, as are excitable phrases like "destroying the west."

There is however a serious point as well: that debates about immigration have got to include some honest discussion about the fact that when you are trying to think about the impact of any given diaspora in its host country, this impact is likely to correlate with the kind of country or region that the diaspora originated from, because cultural norms don't usually completely disappear within a single generation of immigration. The economic and civic contributions of people from dysfunctional or war-torn societies are not likely to be the same as (say) people immigrating from Korea or Norway.

"...the most successful immigrants, in terms of launching businesses and earning wealth, have been found to hail from Asia and Europe. A UCL study found that European immigrants to Britain contribute more to the economy than they take from it while the opposite is true for non European immigrants. ..Immigrants do not come from “Immigrantland”. Population differences related to entrepreneurial and earning potential are real, and significant, and difficult to bridge."

quillette.com/2017/08/27/argument-open-borders-liberal-hubris/

[juliesaway]

Yes, many 3rd world migrants bring nothing. It’s the elephant in the room.

[scatterolight]

Well would you want to live in those countries OP? If not, why not?

People can't have this both ways. You can't insist the West takes refugees from their terrible existences in the third world and then in the same breath proclaim that there's absolutely nothing wrong with those countries.

[Plumsofwrath]

Well, if the West hadn’t raped and pillaged these countries, forcibly enslaving their most able, wrecking communities and families and entire societies in the process; stealing their natural resources; theiving their intellectual might; exporting mass social propaganda; “whitemailing” them economically for centuries to the point they are left in their knees and have nothing left to offer; then bombed them with weapons they’ve made themselves.....maybe they wouldn’t be such shitholes in the eyes of Trump.

There is no intellectual or reasonable policy-based discussion to have here, until it’s acknowledged that the playing field is not and has not ever been even.

Fucking areshole.

[juliesaway]

Hos defenders say this is about economics rather than race.

[juliesaway]

His

[MistressDeeCee]

Awful that there's so much mis-information about Haiti, which tends to lead to uninformed opinion. America's relentlessness in consistently de-stabilising Haiti, as it does with several other Caribbean islands, seems to have been missed somehow. A Haitian friend wrote this online today

Today We Mourn, Tomorrow We Fight

Today, like many of my fellow Haitians and Haitian-Americans, I planned to mourn the dead. I planned to do my mourning quietly and in small doses. I planned to stay busy so I wouldn’t spend the whole day in pain.

I planned to check on the children in my family who lost their father and baby brother in the catastrophic earthquake eight years ago. I planned to write notes to friends and family members who were rescued from the rubble by their neighbors. I planned to get through a panel at a literary festival without breaking down in tears.

I planned to hold my two daughters a little bit tighter tonight, especially my youngest who was the baby I kept in my arms to keep myself from curling up in a fetal position each time I saw a child being pulled from under a school or house on my television screen

Instead, because the President of the United States, who seems determined to insult Haitians every chance he gets, has said that Haitialong with “Africa”is a shithole, I must also lament yet another insult to our dignity.

A few weeks ago, it was “All Haitians have AIDS.” This week we are from a shithole country. Haiti is not unacquainted with racists or white supremacists. We defeated our share of them in 1804 when we became the world’s first black republic. Haiti is not a shithole country.

It is a country that, for example, if France hadn’t grown tired of fighting, it would have never sold 828,000 square miles of land to the US, from the western banks of the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, nearly doubling the size of this country.

Alexander Hamilton said that the Louisiana Purchase would have never happened were it not for the “courage and obstinate resistance of the black inhabitants” of Haiti. We are also the country that the United States has invaded several times, preventing us from consistently ruling ourselves.

If we are a poor country, then our poverty comes in part from pillage and plunder. In the 1980s, the US governmentclaiming that Haitian pigs had swine feverparticipated in the extermination of nearly every native black pig, which represented some families’ entire life savings. These same farmers were then “encouraged” to buy the pampered pink pigs of US farmers. This is only one of many examples I could list.

We are also a country where great art, music, and literature have risen from these and a slew of other woes. We are entrepreneurs, big and small, dreamers, workers. We are a country that created people like my father, who drove a taxicab in Brooklyn, sometimes sixteen hours a day, so that my three brothers (two teachers and an IT specialist) and I could have a better life.

We are the country that eight years ago lost over 300,000 people whose lives and memory we should be commemorating today, rather than trying to hold our heads up wherever in the world we happen to be. Apparently, the President’s remarks came out of a discussion about Temporary Protected Status, during which he is reported to have said “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”

Mr. President, so many have tried to take us out before. Eight years ago, the earth itself tried to take Haiti out. Yet the courage and obstinate resistance of Haitians remain. We survive, and when given the opportunity, we THRIVE.

To borrow a slogan that many Americans of different backgrounds have been using since the beginning of this presidency, today we mourn, tomorrow we fight

[ihatethecold]

Wow. I would be very proud to have a friend that could write so eloquently.

[MistressDeeCee]

ihatethecold she's the quietest person ever..! But she's feeling it today as lost friends and family..some who survived had life-chanigng injuries also. She didn't want to speak but she did write. Im not Haitian but from another Creole Caribbean island. So, have affinity. Trump is inhuman I still can't quite believe he is POTUS really

[SenecaFalls]

There is however a serious point as well: that debates about immigration have got to include some honest discussion about the fact that when you are trying to think about the impact of any given diaspora in its host country, this impact is likely to correlate with the kind of country or region that the diaspora originated from, because cultural norms don't usually completely disappear within a single generation of immigration.

We in the US have been absorbing cultural norms from all over the world for more than 300 years. It's our strength, not our weakness.

[Plumsofwrath]

kokeshi123 and senecafalls

Why should cultural norms disappear at all?

Do you think that if you were obliged (fleeing your war torn or weather ravaged home country, forcibly removed) to leave the UK or wherever you live, to move to another country where you are enslaved or at the very least held back, literally or economically or socially, you would give up your English/ Scottish/ Welsh/ whatever cultural norms? They’re your identity.

[pinkmagic1]

What a fucking racist nob!

[Tapandgo]

YABU if you think Trump ‘thinks’.