What Does Country Mean?

A lovely woman named Sherry attached a comment to my H2B Visas Revisited post pointing out that Canada already has immigration rules that mirror those proposed by Trump. Well, duh? Even the Trump administration said that they had checked the rules for Canada and Australia and then added special rules for the United States. Then Sherry added that her grandparents only spoke Italian when they arrived in the US but learned English to survive.

Guess what, Sherry, your grandparents would not have been admitted to the US under the current rules because they didn't speak English when they arrived. They probably wouldn't have been admitted under other parts of the new proposed point system because they probably didn't have jobs already (even if they had skills), and they probably didn't have money in the bank already. So dear Sherry, you would not be a US citizen under the new proposed point system. Feel better now?  

Lovely Sherry also added that it was very expensive to teach people English when they came to the country without the language. Dear Sherry, how do you think your grandparents, who would be so proud of you now, learned the language? Are you saying that they shouldn't have been allowed in?

As I have written before, my husband and I visited the Tenement Museum in NYC some time ago. Sherry should go, although my guess is she couldn't be bothered. The building went from being in what was called Little Germany in 1863 when it opened as a tenement (at that time it only meant a multi-person dwelling), to being the home of Italian speaking immigrants in 1923, the last time it was a private dwelling. My grandfather may have even lived in the building since in 1888, when he was 13 years old, he was apprenticed to the Brewster Carriage Company, which building is now fancy condos ($1M base price for a studio) around the corner from the Tenement Museum, and in 1888 the predominant language was still German.

Sherry, and all her ilk, would have us protected from foreign influences, that she believes destroy America. She believes that teaching people English is too expensive for any  community to bear. I might just go Anthony Scaramucci on Sherry but what I want to ask her is, "E lei, parlei l'Italiano?"