Originally Posted by
Rich Beaudoin
In 1960, my dad immigrated to Los Angeles from Quebec as a 19 year old who spoke no English. He had an aunt & uncle who were living there, so they sponsored his visa. He still doesn’t speak English well enough to pass middle school and my Canadian relatives say he still speaks French like a teenager.
He became an American citizen in 1979 and now he is an anti-immigration conservative!
And a racist too, despite being part Native American. When speaking with him, it is clear that he gets 100% of his news from FOX.
I avoid political conversations in general, but when he stated a few things as fact regarding immigration, I couldn’t resist countering some points.
He talked about immigrants causing crime; I reminded him that he was an immigrant and a convicted felon too (he was in jail most of my high school years for drug offenses).
Regarding jobs, he said that my nephew couldn’t get a job because of all the “immigrants and cripples” (the nephew is an 18 year old who refuses to work at his parents garden supply store in a very white town, and who stopped going to his job at a pizza restaurant because he wasn’t getting enough hours). This is privileged young man, not a person who would do manual labor in any form.
Finally he said immigrants should go home and apply to come legally like him - he claimed that he had to wait two years after applying for a US visa. I called BS as I knew this was not the case.
It amazes me that he doesn’t see the irony in his views vs his own life and how he has conveniently revised his own history.
How much worse is this when the immigration happened to more distant relatives?