Remember earlier this month when Lily Tomlin compared America to Nazi Germany, Senator Chuck Schumer cried, and mobs chanted “No hate, no fear/Everyone is welcome here” at airports because the president blocked Cuban refugees from entering the country?
No, you don’t recall that happening? Well, me neither.
The federal government’s crackdown on immigrants, at least ones from a single country, certainly happened. But the protests didn’t. That fact that President Obama rather than President Trump issued the order surely muted the response. So, too, in a no-enemies-to-the-left manner, did the fact that the order helped a Communist prison-state tighten its grip on the inmates.
“More than 1,000 Cuban migrants who endured monthslong treks across as many as 10 countries to reach the United States are marooned in Mexico, halted by the Obama administration’s decision this month to end special immigration privileges for Cubans who make it to the American border,” Frances Robles reported last week of Obama’s executive order in the New York Times.
Peter Baker reported of Trump’s executive order in the Times yesterday, “Only about 109 travelers were detained in the first 24 hours, out of the 325,000 who typically enter the United States in a day, they said. As of Sunday evening, the Department of Homeland Security said 392 green card holders had been granted waivers to enter.”
In other words, Trump’s policy affected about one-tenth the number of people that Obama’s harmed, yet the media coverage of the former appears exponentially greater than the latter. Getting delayed at the airport is a total drag but it’s not as though the detainees waded through crocodile-infested waters, as the Times reports the Cubans did, to get here. And stopping travelers from visiting ranks as an inconvenience not on par with blocking the oppressed from living freely.
If journalists can forget the executive order on Cuba issued earlier this month as they highlight the one that pertains to travelers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, then one begins to understand their amnesia over Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Franklin Roosevelt all singling out foreigners from specific countries for travel bans in the past.
This isn’t unprecedented. The reaction to it is.
If your people gave America the fastest pitch in baseball history, Bacardi, and the green-haired, white-faced Joker, then adios. If your people took U.S. embassy workers hostage, killed GIs in a discothèque, and occasionally chant “death to America,” then as-salaam alaikum.
Some foreigners are more equal than others.
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