If Donald Trump hadn’t chucked paper towels into the crowd when he visited here and thought it appropriate; if anything like the resources rushed to hurricane victims in Texas and Florida last year had also come to Puerto Rico. Generators, roof tarps, satellite phones, fuel. If they hadn’t been made to feel ignored like foreigners even though their passports say they’re Americans, you might not think so bad of Trump.
But is the emptying out of Puerto Rico happening by design? Are darker forces at work? We had a not dissimilar debate after Katrina, thirteen years ago. Were so many of the black poor being deliberately displaced and relocated in Texas, to leave a healthier, less burdened New Orleans behind? A whiter New Orleans?
Trump’s Puerto Rico comments are masking the scale of the disaster
I’m no conspiracy theorist but two colliding phenomena happening in the US are worth considering. First, the anti-immigrant wave. Trump is still pursuing his Muslim travel ban and assails daily a caravan of asylum-seekers that crossed Mexico from Honduras and El Salvador and is now huddled against the border in Tijuana. On Friday, 50,000 Hondurans who have been allowed to live and work in the US since 1999 were told they must be gone in two years.
At the same time, just-released data shows the US with a startling 3.9 per cent jobless rate, the lowest in almost two decades. In tight labour markets, employers traditionally turn to new immigrants to keep the wheels turning, legal and also illegal.
You see the conundrum. An inconvenient reality for Trump and his supporters comes into view. So thank heavens for the Puerto Ricans suddenly flooding in, mostly to Florida but actually to every state in the union, bar Alaska. Industries of all kinds are courting them, from meatpacking plants in South Dakota to hotels desperate to fill summer vacancies in Disneyland and Dallas.
Schoolkids scream with joy as electricity returns to their school in Puerto Rico
After Katrina struck, they physically put folk onto buses and deposited them in the Astrodome in Houston. Many never returned. That couldn’t have happened after Maria, right? Actually it did. This time Fema, the disaster aid agency, chartered planes and cruise ships to get people off the island and gave many of them hotel vouchers to stay on the mainland once they arrived.
We’d be giving the Trump folk far too much credit to suggest this was all planned from the start. That after Maria, Puerto Ricans were identified as the “acceptable immigrants” to help fill the gaps in the US economy that banning all others would create. Not that Americans can be termed immigrants.
But is the emptying out of Puerto Rico happening by design? Are darker forces at work? We had a not dissimilar debate after Katrina, thirteen years ago. Were so many of the black poor being deliberately displaced and relocated in Texas, to leave a healthier, less burdened New Orleans behind? A whiter New Orleans?
Trump’s Puerto Rico comments are masking the scale of the disaster
I’m no conspiracy theorist but two colliding phenomena happening in the US are worth considering. First, the anti-immigrant wave. Trump is still pursuing his Muslim travel ban and assails daily a caravan of asylum-seekers that crossed Mexico from Honduras and El Salvador and is now huddled against the border in Tijuana. On Friday, 50,000 Hondurans who have been allowed to live and work in the US since 1999 were told they must be gone in two years.
At the same time, just-released data shows the US with a startling 3.9 per cent jobless rate, the lowest in almost two decades. In tight labour markets, employers traditionally turn to new immigrants to keep the wheels turning, legal and also illegal.
You see the conundrum. An inconvenient reality for Trump and his supporters comes into view. So thank heavens for the Puerto Ricans suddenly flooding in, mostly to Florida but actually to every state in the union, bar Alaska. Industries of all kinds are courting them, from meatpacking plants in South Dakota to hotels desperate to fill summer vacancies in Disneyland and Dallas.
Schoolkids scream with joy as electricity returns to their school in Puerto Rico
After Katrina struck, they physically put folk onto buses and deposited them in the Astrodome in Houston. Many never returned. That couldn’t have happened after Maria, right? Actually it did. This time Fema, the disaster aid agency, chartered planes and cruise ships to get people off the island and gave many of them hotel vouchers to stay on the mainland once they arrived.
We’d be giving the Trump folk far too much credit to suggest this was all planned from the start. That after Maria, Puerto Ricans were identified as the “acceptable immigrants” to help fill the gaps in the US economy that banning all others would create. Not that Americans can be termed immigrants.
