Most American citizens are folks you would like. Most American citizens welcome individuals who want to come to America legally, and who want to become Americans. We would like to have more who are interested in becoming Americans, in pursuing the American dream.
This is my correspondent Jack, writing to me at the end of a week which has tested our patience with a certain strand of American behaviour demonstrated by America’s president and his entourage. I have spent a lot of my “holiday time!” in America and some work time, which seemed like a holiday (New Orleans and Boston). I have friends in California and New York, I listen to Dylan and Springsteen a lot, I admire America but I won’t go there today. I think Jack picked this up, read what he says.
We are not so hot on people who come here but who do not want to become Americans, who don’t invest here but remit as much as possible back to their country of origin.
If you look, over the past 80+ years, you will see Americans at work in other countries trying to help – directly, hands on as well as indirectly, via foreign aid, aid after a catastrophe, etc. Americans are very generous.
Easy example is not President Obama, who failed when it came to the middle East, and north Africa, and in various other international relationships and endeavors.
It was President Obama who pulled up the ladder to curtail refugees from Cuba (one foot dry).
It was President Obama who curtailed refugees from Iraq.
It was President Carter who curtailed refugees from Haiti and Cuba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Mariel_boatlift https://www.migrationpolicy.
org/news/carter-immigration- legacy It was Democrats, specifically Jerry Brown, who resisted refugees from South Vietnam:
https://www.spokesman.com/
stories/2025/apr/27/as-south- vietnam-fell-a-democratic- governor-turned/ It was FDR who refused entry of Jewish refugees on the St. Louis – many who later died in the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
MS_St._Louis It was only the idiot President Biden who opened the gates and let in anyone who could manage to get here, including hundreds of thousands of gotaways (folks who would have been returned immediately had they been caught or encountered CBP). Over 400 people came to America who were admitted even though they were on America’s terror watch list!
The easy examples in recent memory would be George H. W. Bush, when the wall came down (and his support for Lech Walesa/Pope John Paul II, not only when it came to German reunification, but his reticence and decision not to take advantage of the decline in the Eastern bloc); and his son, George W. Bush, in his efforts to rid Africa of the scourge of AIDS and other diseases.
For comparison, seldom would you see folks from other countries come to America to help out when we have a disaster, a hurricane, a California fire, a tornado in the midwest, etc. So, most folks don’t encounter Americans in their everyday lives or at the worst time of their lives.
Did you know that, of all the people who are citizens or lawfully present in America, that the percentage who are foreign born has again reached an all time high of nearly 15%, 1 in 7 people walking our streets (highest to include our first census in 1790)? https://www.
migrationpolicy.org/programs/ Add in the folks who are not lawfully present, and that number changes to almost 20%, almost 1 in 5.data-hub/charts/immigrant- population-over-time Unfortunately, the percentage of Americans who you (or anyone) would like declines precipitously when it comes to folks we elect to office – both our federal government and our state governments.
There are exceptions of course, some exceptional people make their way into government office. Most important, when it comes to American politicians, try to ignore what they say, watch what they do.
This is a post to me of a republican who would like me to like him and republicans and that is something that I have never thought of doing. I have never thought of there being a sour side of Obama , Jerry Brown and FDR, I have never thought much about Biden being an idiot.
What I think about is Gaza and Iraq and Indonesia and large parts of Africa when i think of misrule and ill-applied violence. I think too of ICE. In short I think of war-making by the American Government today and I hate to think of my friends who are living in a country they must be hating. I suspect Jack is hating his Government even though it acts in the name of republicans.
I wish Jack well, I wish my American friends well and I wish my British friends who have emigrated to America well too. Nothing is sorted by being a republican or a democrat, what is needed is a love of people, the kind of love I hear from Springsteen and Dylan and I remind myself of, when I think back to my holidays. I hope that I will have holidays in America again.
I think of Johnny Cash and all who came before him, of the South, of blues , of bluegrass and of country music and I know that America is intrinsically good.
