World leaders react to Trump’s vile remark
Recent comment from president declared racist and derogatory
President Donald Trump’s comments last week disparaging Haiti, El Salvador and African countries with a slur have sparked international outrage and confirmed fears of an administration whose immigration policy is guided more by bias than any coherent principles of justice.
During a White House meeting last Thursday in which Democratic and Republican leaders met with President Donald Trump to discuss the uncertain future of millions of immigrants previously protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and the Temporary Protected Status program, several sources said that the president asked, “Why are we having all these people from hole countries come here?”
The president suggested the U.S. should accept more immigrants from places like Norway, whose Prime Minister he met with earlier in the week.
Trump denies having uttered the slur, but the alleged comment echoes much of the same anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric he used during his campaign, as well as the policies he has implemented as president.
“I have to express first how demoralizing and upsetting it is to have to register my outrage about hateful remarks made by my own president,” said state Sen. Linda Dorcena Forry in a press statement. “The president’s words are ignorant and repulsive and an affront to decency and to history. I’m very disappointed in us, the people of the United States, who saw fit to elect an ignorant, mean-spirited, white supremacist to the most powerful office in the world.”
The spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, called Trump’s statements “shocking and shameful comments from the president of the United States.”
“I’m sorry but there’s no other word one can use but ‘racist,’” Colville said. “You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as holes whose entire populations who are not white are therefore not welcome. The positive comment on Norway makes the underlying sentiment very clear.”
Yves Cajuste, Haitian-American journalist for Multicultural Television Network, said he was both sad and angry when he heard about the President’s alleged comments.
“It’s not something as an American that we can expect from our president, the leader of the free world,” he said. “We have to elect people at the local, state, and national level who really represent the real America, not Donald Trump’s America.”
Cajuste said he has felt lucky to live and work in Massachusetts, where Haitians are welcome and that Haitian relations with the state go back to 1862 when the U.S. recognized Haiti’s independence largely due to the efforts of former U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who was also chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time.
“Given the historical reality of how many Africans arrived in the United States as slaves, this statement flies in the face of all accepted behavior and practice,” said African Union spokeswoman Ebba Kalondo. “This is particularly surprising as the United States of America remains a global example of how migration gave birth to a nation built on strong values of diversity and opportunity.”
Historical exclusion
Immigration to the U.S. has occurred in waves, in tandem with the tides of U.S. policy, which historically, has included, then excluded certain groups.
Over two million Central Europeans, mainly Catholics and Jews, immigrated to the country between 1880 and 1924.
Then, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which set quotas so that the number of people admitted from any country annually would be no more than 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already living in the U.S. as of 1890.
It also gave preference to immigrants from Central, Northern and Western Europe, significantly limiting the numbers from Russia and Southern Europe, and barred all immigrants from Asia. These new policies were used to maintain the ethnic composition of the nation and minimize perceived job competition.
Time and time again, politicians have used immigrant groups as scapegoats for social and economic ills. Trump is repeating history in using fearmongering, scare tactics and racist ideologies to appeal to white, rural working-class residents who reportedly have felt forgotten in our rapidly urbanizing and modernizing country. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Trump’s margin of votes during the 2016 election among whites without a college degree is the largest among any candidate in exit polls since 1980.
This political tactic was apparent when he implemented a Muslim travel ban early on in his presidency and in his obsession with building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, his characterization of Mexicans as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists” and most recently, his denigration of countries who are now denied Temporary Protection Status.
