Cartoon: Africa Dumping Its "Wretched Refuse" On Europe
09/19/2015
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I suppose the cartoon above (source) with it's trashcan metaphor will be considered racist, even though the artist hasn't made much effort to make the dumpees look like Third-Worlders. (Of course, many Syrians look white—John Derbyshire, looking at photos of  the 9/11 hijackers said that  one of them, Wail al-Shehri, was  "the spitting image of a boy I went to school with — a boy of entirely English origins, whose name was Hobson".

However, if the cartoonist's trash metaphor is racist, so is Emma Lazarus's oft-quoted call to take in the "wretched refuse" of 19th century Europe's "teeming shore."

So here, once again, is Jerry Seinfeld, on this subject:

I am for open immigration, but that sign we have on the front of the Statue of Liberty, “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…” can't we just say, “Hey, the door's open, we'll take whoever you got”? Do we have to specify the wretched refuse? I mean, why don't we just say, “Give us the unhappy, the sad, the slow, the ugly, people that can't drive, that they have trouble merging, if they can't stay in their lane, if they don't signal, they can't parallel park, if they're sneezing, if they're stuffed up, if they're clogged, if they have bad penmanship, don't return calls, if they have dandruff, food between their teeth, if they have bad credit, if they have no credit, missed a spot shaving, in other words any dysfunctional defective slob that you can somehow cattle prod onto a wagon, send them over, we want 'em.”
Broadcast date: January 27, 1993
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