White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has been a hard-line anti-immigrant voice in the Trump administration, reportedly encouraging the president to reject the bipartisan DACA deal that Congressional leaders brought to him.
Kelly was proven to be a true xenophobe with his controversial comments on NPR last week where he had this to say about immigrants:
“But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society,” Kelly claimed. “They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from – fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English, obviously that’s a big thing. They don’t speak English. They don’t integrate well, they don’t have skills.
Genealogist Jennifer Mendelsohn saw Kelly’s remarks and, knowing that unless your ancestry is Native American every U.S. citizen is descended from immigrants, decided to do a little research into Kelly’s own immigration history.
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Mendelsohn’s findings should further embarrass Kelly, who has faced extensive criticism for his comments, especially since she posted the results on Twitter.
Deep dive tk, but here is the 1910 census showing Kelly's great-grandfather Giuseppe Pedalino and his second wife Concetta. (Kelly's great-grandma died in 1898.)
He was a wagon driver.
She was illiterate and could not speak English 10 years after arrival.#resistancegenealogy pic.twitter.com/N9AfuLNvb1— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 11, 2018
Here's John Kelly's maternal grandmother Teresa as a child in the 1900 census.
Her father, a day laborer named John DeMarco had been here for 18 years.
He had not become a citizen.
He could not read, write, or speak English.#resistancegenealogy pic.twitter.com/pmnHD4Yobq— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 11, 2018
The 1930 census shows those great-grandparents living with their daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, one of whom was Kelly's mother.
John DeMarco had been here for 47 years and was not an American citizen ("AL"). Crescenza had been here for 37 years and spoke no English. pic.twitter.com/5Nyfsu48y0
— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 11, 2018
Thanks to Jennifer Mendelsohn for her research which shows just how hypocritical Kelly is being in applying standards to modern immigrants that today would have had ICE turning up at his great-grandfather’s door to put him in a concentration camp, if he had been able to enter the country at all.
Perhaps the only rationale that one could point to for implementing the immigration policies that John Kelly is espousing is the faint hope that these policies would prevent a future John Kelly-type of hypocritical bigot from ever being born, but that is too implausible a reason to even think about supporting such a misguided and essentially un-American position.
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