The controversy over Ken Cuccinelli and the Statue of Liberty erupted this week when he announced President Trump’s new plan to deny visas and permanent residency to many legal immigrants who apply for food stamps or public housing, among other benefits.
Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services, insisted that the rules are in keeping with American values and asserted that the famed poem inscribed at the base of Lady Liberty should be tweaked to reflect that only immigrants who could “stand on their own two feet.” He also claimed the poem was only intended to welcome European immigrants.
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Ken Cuccinelli says immigrants should be able to “stand on their own feet” and the Statue of Liberty’s famed poem was only supposed to apply to newcomers from Europe.
But the hardline Trump immigration official’s own ancestors were dirt-poor Italian laborers who apparently came through Ellis Island on a crowded steamship like millions of other future Americans, documents obtained by the Daily News suggest.
“True to his word and kind and supportive to all, he left a legacy that is still growing in stature and importance,” Cuccinelli proudly wrote on Facebook on the 100th anniversary of the birth of his grandfather, Domenick Luigi Cuccinelli.
But it was his great-grandfather — with no education and had little or nothing to his name — who immigrated from Italy to the United States. He found a place to live with his wife in a Hoboken tenement.
Even his son, the revered patriarch about whom Ken Cuccinelli waxed poetic, failed to make it past eighth grade and found work where he could in the teeming New Jersey shipyards.
The main thing that separates Cuccinelli’s great-grandfather, who was also named Domenick, from the immigrants of today is time.
“Everything Trump is saying about the Mexicans was said about the Italians,” said Christina Ziegler-McPherson, a former Hoboken public historian. “They were at the bottom of the social pecking order and many, many people did not want them here.”
The main thing that separates Cuccinelli’s great-grandfather, who was also named Domenick, from the immigrants of today is time.
But don't forget the other line that almost every Trump-tainted conservative I know will tell you. "MY" (great) grandparents did it LEGALLY." So, when the huddled masses part won't persuade them that a Guatemalan with a fifth grade education can be a decent addition to American life, the "legal" fallback is employed to distinguish the poor who now arrive from "sh!thole countries" from their poor forebears who arrived from sh!thole backgrounds in Europe.
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-------------------------------- “It's hard to win an argument with a smart person. It's damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person." -- Bill Murray
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