My reference to the Centennial being a few years off had nothing to do with the French gift on the Centennial of their making all the difference in the USA confederation becoming a nation, but when the USA actually became the nation it is through our Constitution. That’s 1789, before then there was no Bill of Rights, states actually made economic war on each other, and had their own armies and navies. It simply isn’t the same country other than geography, demographics, and 1776. When people call to the Constitution, they aren’t calling to the nation under the Articles of Confederation.

“And of course no one–including Trump–is saying anything as absurd as “we only need Scandinavians.” But then you undid that by “We did Trump actually say about Norwegians? We don’t know, you don’t know; all we know is that the WaPo said that “several” anonymous people who were not at the meeting but were “briefed” on it said they had been told he had said.” The two statements are in opposition to each other. If we or you don’t know what he said then neither we nor you can say he didn’t say anything ‘as absurd as…’ or did. Going back to your take on him before the election, those words are not out of character for that man.

Further, and I’m allowing for your comment being on the 15th, it’s more than just WaPo. We have Grahame dancing around the subject while asserting that he made the President aware of his belief about our high ideals. We have Republicans, yeah anonymous, saying Trump didn’t say ‘shitholes’ but ‘shithouses’ like that’s a distinction with a difference. And we have Durbin, someone I don’t know was at the meeting or wasn’t, saying Trump said something with bad with ‘shit’ as the first part, wtih Trump tweeting “Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals can’t get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military,” There’s some irony there about an habitual liar, as well as things not necessarily tied to each other. I did think ‘Dicky’ was elevating.

Finally, what’s really going on here is the 2018 elections. The ruling party usually loses power in the mid-term elections, So the Republicans have to down play anything bad, and the Democrats will play up anything they can. If the ruling party was the Democrats, the roles would be reversed. Given that every President since Truman has had more approval in their first year than Trump (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/) I can understand the Republican fear of this mid-term.

After that, it took over 200 years for Swedish immigration to the USA to start up, with one factor being the Famine of 1866-1868 in Scandinavia. Swedish immigration tapered off when cheap land in the West and Upper Midwest was no longer available, and when Sweden itself began to industrialize, essentially ending in the decade before WWI.

Even back then, Scandinavian immigrants were regarded as more desirable than other sorts (the Irish and those from Southern and Eastern Europe).

Presumably, some of the varied and less developed nations of this world could become better functioning and more developed over time, and perhaps that could more easily be done by importing great numbers of Scandinavians into them.

The first, of course, is the childish “Mommeee! Johnny said a bad word!” aspect of the whole tempest to begin with. We’re not 5 years old. This is juvenile to begin with, but what makes it worse is that it’s yet another case of the hard left launching an unanswerable accusation (in this case, indirect) at political rivals. So now, apparently, Republicans should not even enter closed-door meetings with lefties, unless they are recording the session (which isn’t legal in many states of course).

Secondly, is the lefty projection of their own issues on other people. There are sh%holes in the world. They are sh#^holes not because of the color of anyone’s skin, but because of the broken cultures that made and sustain them. In the desperate drive to drag the West into third-worlddom, the left wants to pretend that all cultures, especially non-Western ones, are perfect just the way they are, but I, and millions of others, know differently. Without the rule of law, without some cultural concept that all people have fundamental rights, cultures are fundamentally broken and cannot coexist with lawful, peaceful neighbors. Violent lawlessness, cultural intolerance (as in cleansing, executions, imprisonment, destruction of businesses and property, forcing people to flee, and so forth, based on ethnicity or religious practice) and corruption that is rife among the s^#holes of the world make them places we don’t want more people from. Assuming Trump actually did say the pottymouth word and did say we don’t want more people from such places – he’s right. We see what has happened to Europe. We all know it’s true and no one is brave enough to say it.

The naé¯ve first world has been trying to fix the sh#%holes of the world for a long time. We throw money at them, only to have it line the pockets of corrupt governments. Now, the hard left has decided that it would be even better just to mass-transport the populations of these places to other people’s neighborhoods, so that they can bring their sh#^hole culture and build new sh#^%holes, while living on the largesse of working taxpayers – and voting for Democrats, which of course is the important part.

If I say sh^#hole, and you think “dark skinned person” the problem is in you, not me. Someone has to start shutting the left down every time they try to project their racism, their intolerance and their hatred on everyone else.

1) There was no welfare state then. You had to sink or swim on your own. I read once (sorry don’t have a link or independent proof) that some years the number going back to Europe exceeded the number coming in.

2) Assimilation was expected. Until the day they died my paternal grandparents seemed like they just got off the boat (even my grandmother who was born in the US!), but my parents were fully assimilated greatest-generation Americans. Both my family and my country are better off that they Americanized so thoroughly. Nowadays “assimilation” is a dirty word, maybe not only from the immigrants themselves as Geoffrey suggests but from American leftists who promote “multiculturalism” and division for political purposes.

Lazarus’ poem was written when “that French gift” was already under construction and part of it had been exhibited in the US. Lazarus wrote her poem as part of a fund-raising effort for the statue’s pedestal, quite a few years after work on the statue had already begun. In fact, the statue’s arm had already been created and exhibited from 1876-1882 (photo here).

The statue was to commemorate the 1776 War of Independence and France’s help in it; Lazarus’ poem was written in 1883 but didn’t become famous until two decades later:

Lazarus’s contribution was solicited by fundraiser William Maxwell Evarts. Initially she refused but writer Constance Cary Harrison convinced her that the statue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into the harbor.

“The New Colossus” was the first entry read at the exhibit’s opening on November 2, 1883, and remained associated with the exhibit through a published catalog until the exhibit closed after the pedestal was fully funded in August 1885, but was forgotten and played no role at the opening of the statue in 1886. It was, however, published in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World as well as The New York Times during this time period. In 1901, Lazarus’s friend Georgina Schuyler began an effort to memorialize Lazarus and her poem, which succeeded in 1903 when a plaque bearing the text of the poem was put on the inner wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

If Lazarus was thinking of anyone in particular, it was probably Jews. The timing certainly works, because the poem was written in 1883:

Lazarus became more interested in her Jewish ancestry after reading the George Eliot novel Daniel Deronda, and as she heard of the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of this anti-Semitic violence, thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York. Lazarus began to advocate on behalf of indigent Jewish refugees. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting. In 1883, she founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jew.

And of course no one—including Trump—is saying anything as absurd as “we only need Scandinavians.”

We did Trump actually say about Norwegians? We don’t know, you don’t know; all we know is that the WaPo said that “several” anonymous people who were not at the meeting but were “briefed” on it said they had been told he had said. Perhaps you like to play advanced games of telephone; personally, I don’t, and it doesn’t matter who is being quoted or misquoted, or what party they’re from.

But for what it’s worth, here’s what the WaPo was told by their anonymous informants who didn’t hear it themselves:

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 that 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.

The “deal,” by the way, was a reference to a deal that favors and encourages immigration from certain countries at the expense of other countries.

Not even Trump was talking about banning anyone, and he wasn’t talking about race. He was talking about economics and education—even according to those anonymous informants who are certainly not his fans. He was talking about whether we should favor and encourage more immigration from failed and depressed countries.

So no, we don’t only need people from Scandinavia, nor was anyone suggesting that. I realize you probably know that and were raising a strawman. But I’m putting the facts out there for anyone else who might be interested.

And the Berlin Wall, by the way, was to keep people inside a country, not out. Building a border wall to keep people from another country out, on the other hand, is actually quite common, as you can see. Is it okay with you that all these countries do this, or would you like all those walls to come down? Or is it only the US that’s not allowed to have a wall?

By the way, regarding whether an actual wall could be built along the entire border, I tackled that question in August of 2015. And by the way, Trump has often said it won’t be a solid wall along the entire border. The most recent time he said this was here, but even back during the campaign he was saying it on occasion (see this).

My bad. I did mean that the wall was necessary. Or at least the Border Patrol believes it. As Ariel avers the Border Patrol might be wrong, but you cited evidence that the fencing that has been completed has been effective. Of course a wall must be backed up by a well disciplined, highly motivated Border Patrol. There is no substitute for hands on, human enforcement.

Can we stop all illegals? Nope. But the idea is to make the problem small enough to be manageable. People look at it as it is now and throw up their hands, “Aw crap, it’s too big. Nothing can be done.” Trump doesn’t think that way. He is willing to work the problem.

Having visited many of the sh*tholes of the world, I don’t look down on the people who live there. They can’t help where they were born. Most of them are trapped in cultures that have no traditions or knowledge of freedom, private property, and how to build wealth. We should all thank God every day for the fortune of having been born here or having been able to move here.

This is a blessed land, but it didn’t just happen. It was built by enlightened humans who understood that freedom, private property laws backed by courts, and reasonably honest representative government allows ambitious and hard-working people to prosper. I have no objection to taking immigrants from these sh*tholes if they will not be an economic or social burden to the U.S. But we shouldn’t prefer them over other well qualified immigrants either.

What is our obligation to the sh*tholes? We have been quite charitable to many of them. Often with little or no thanks. We have attempted to help many countries build their economies through aid and trade. That the concept of real representative government and secure private property rights has failed to catch on in most failed states is not our fault. We can provide an example, but we can’t force them to change. And we should not beggar ourselves in order to provide them with a higher standard of living. Nor should we destroy our culture and squander our wealth to bring all the wretched souls to our shores. End of rant.

“CAP Action’s memo says protecting DACA is not only a “moral imperative” for Democrats, it also key to getting votes.” So, unlike the Republicans who only see illegals, they see the moral issue but also see the impact on voting, but therefore all they care about is votes. Well, the Republicans see neither, so I guess they’re better.

Frankly, when I was Republican I would have voted against any Republican against DACA, or it’s equivalent, because I do see the moral imperative. (Damn, that killed my argument that Republicans don’t see the moral imperative. Oh, wait, the Party left me.)

Moreover, Republicans wanting these Americanized children sent back to countries they don’t know are doing what?, a moral imperative?, the Rule of Law (a law that they can change)?, or pandering to a base that see illegals, any illegal, as the greatest threat to our nation since Communism? Okay the next greatest threat…so it’s all about the votes for the Republicans and for the Democrats a moral imperative and votes.

The Dems, maybe like Reagan, realize this is a problem that isn’t going to be solved through simplistic, very expensive, solutions that will be obsolete when the mortar dries. I could mention the issues of rivers, ecology, etc. to keep out nothing other than 4% of the total US population that for the most part do shit jobs. Ever been to Yuma, the lettuce bowl of the USA?

Whatever you build to keep people out they will find a way around if the see treasure on the other side. So help them create the treasure on their side and they won’t offend you by coming here.

Really, you have to do what the East Germans did, kill ’em whenever you can. So what was Reagan talking about…

Yep, the Statue of Liberty was given as a centennial present in 1886 (though, really it was a few years early). And by 1886 it was certainly misnamed because we were already moving to what SCOTUS would give its stamp of approval for 10 years later. Nope, we weren’t doing Liberty yet other than lip-service.

OTH, E. Lazarus wrote that ignoble poem of letting in non-PhDs before that French gift. Maybe she saw the Irish and all those other groups that came here from shithole nations, mostly White nations granted, but still politically and economically challenged. Maybe, just, maybe most of the people that did come here were trying to escape something bad, like the Italians and the Irish did.

Yep, today we only need Scandinavians. You know, people from real social Democrat nations.