The day before Saint Patrick’s Day, Thursday March 16th, our president spoke at the Friends of Ireland Luncheon. While this was an innocent-seeming event, the speech that he gave revealed some of the hypocritical biases that he has towards people of different religions and ethnicities.
Right from the start, he stated that Saint Patrick’s day is to “celebrate America’s commitment to Ireland and the tremendous contributions -- and I know it well -- the Irish immigrants and their descendants have made right here in the United States and throughout the world”- which is ironic coming from a man that has made two attempts at passing a travel ban.
The more that he spoke, the more clear it became why he treats Irish immigrants differently than immigrants from other parts of the world. In this speech he addressed Irish Catholic immigrants with welcome arms, and ignored that there are approximately 50,000 Irish citizens living in America illegally, who would also be affected if this ban progresses to a broader scope, according to the New York Times.
The Taoiseach, or prime minister, Enda Kenney also spoke and seemed less than pleased with his “new friend” Donald Trump. He spoke of his concern for the thousands of Irish illegal immigrants living here, and this concern obviously extends across millions of other illegal immigrants that currently reside in the United States. He spoke about how people just want to contribute to America, and “all they want is the opportunity to be free”.
Citizens from Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, and Syria also want that freedom, but have been so vilified by the Trump Administration that they cannot seek the same freedom as Irish immigrants. Whether he owns up to it or not, our president has painted a picture of people of different religions and foreign countries as a threat even though so many want to embrace American freedoms.
Trump and his comrades have also not been sly about this Islamophobia either, being that since 2015 he has repeatedly made claims to the tune of calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on” according to the Atlantic.
Repeatedly throughout the campaigning process, Trump painted Mexican immigrants as rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and even coined the term “bad hombres” in the final presidential debate. This rhetoric poses as a major threat to millions of global citizens living in America, as well as straining the relationship that the United States has with the rest of the world. Unjustified racism and fictionalized fear is a danger to freedom and a blatant embarrassment. While we can celebrate the successes of Irish Catholic citizens in America, attempts by citizens from the Middle East or Mexico are viewed as a threat.
For the representative of a nation that was founded by immigrants fleeing for religious freedom, it seems that Donald Trump is not representing this purpose at all. Taoiseach Kenney has noted that Trump's language is "racist and dangerous", and the words seem to speak for themselves.
