This past Thursday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson fired off a tweet asking why America would benefit from “having tons of people from failing countries” arrive on its shores. If Carlson was looking to provoke his liberal critics, it worked. But the response wasn’t the typical ad-hominem back-and-forth that defines most of today’s political Twitter wars; it was a genuine smackdown of Carlson’s apparent fundamental misunderstanding of what America is all about.
As reported by Al Jazeera, this Wednesday a more narrowed version of President Trump’s Muslim ban went into effect, with the State Department declaring that visa applicants from the six Muslim-majority countries targeted by the ban must have a close family relationship in the U.S. or “formal ties to an American entity” in order to be admitted to the country.
#Tucker: Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here? @FoxNews
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 30, 2017
The question is a good one. Why does American benefit from people arriving from failing countries? The answer lies in the personal stories of people who are the children and beneficiaries of immigrants. Others simply couldn’t comprehend the tone-deafness of the tweet:
America was literally created by people whose countries failed them. https://t.co/jeUk4NEmBn
— Oliver Griswold (@originalgriz) June 30, 2017
Are you new here? What a ridiculously naive and un-American question. You just described most of our country.
— John Aravosis (@aravosis) June 30, 2017
Study after study reveals the huge benefits immigrants bring to our country.
What kind of proof does Tucker have he & fans contribute value— Erin Conroy (@chargrille) June 30, 2017
1/Found it! Steve Jobs’s bio father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali (Arabic: عبد الفتاح الجندلي) born inHoms, Syria in an Arab Muslim household.
— Janda Keenan (@janda_keenan) June 30, 2017
2/He pursued a PhD at the Univ of Wisconsin, where he met Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic of Swiss and German descent
— Janda Keenan (@janda_keenan) June 30, 2017
3/her parents were not happy that their daughter was dating Jandali: “it wasn’t that he was Middle-Eastern so much as that he was a Muslim.”
— Janda Keenan (@janda_keenan) June 30, 2017
4/Steve was placed for adoption.
— Janda Keenan (@janda_keenan) June 30, 2017
Tweeting, on a smartphone I assume, the question of how does US benefit from having people from failing countries come here is just too good
— Brendan Kayes (@BrendanKayes) June 30, 2017
I’m from one of those failing countries. I became lawyer who has helped plenty of Americans. Father also a lawyer. Mother a social worker.
— Kim KardafricanWorst (@wstafrican) June 30, 2017
I led a platoon in combat in Iraq. Here are some names of my Soldiers
Olea
Perez
Ramirez
Huy
Rico
Sazueta
Bautista
Gonzalez
h/t @BFriedmanDC— Aaron Harris (@aaharr) July 1, 2017
50% of US Nobel Prize winners were born overseas–you really don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
— Daniel Calto (@djc2272) June 30, 2017
They didn’t do anything except cure polio, build the US space program, and start the world’s most dominant Internet companies-What did U do?
— Daniel Calto (@djc2272) June 30, 2017
My parents were immigrants from Mexico and Argentina, I was born here and served in Iraq and Afghan, in the army for 15 yrs, did you serve??
— Stan Moroncini (@StanMoroncini) July 1, 2017
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