Literary Corner; Wokers of the World

 

My new Twitter handle, which I'll probably dump in a week or two, is from Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana), the tool with the Oxford doctorate, rubbery lips and finger-wave hair who pretends to be a folksy Walt Kelly character, looking like Porky Pine (above) and thinking like Senator Simple J. Malarkey (a sweaty caricature of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy), who's taken to ranting about "woke neosocialist cupcakes", and recently introduced the word "wokers", as in maybe "Wokers of the world, unite!" in this bizarre appearance with Sean Hannity:

Bow to the Wokers

by Senator John Neely Kennedy

I think they believe in open borders
That is very unfair — I mean, think about it.
We have Nigerian doctors and German engineers
who are following the law, they're waiting years
to be properly vetted, but yet President Biden
will allow any gangbanger who can cross the river
and jump the fence, he just says, 'Come on into America.'
It's also very dangerous. We don’t have the
slightest idea who's coming into our country.
But I don’t think the Biden Administration
will change because they prefer to bow
to the wokers and open borders as part
of the Woker Cupcake Bible. The wokers
honestly believe that venting people
at the border is racist. They honestly
believe that. And I know that sounds like —
that I am saying it, I am from Crazy
Town, but that is what they believe.

That isn't what I believe, and I'm as entitled to be called a "woker" as anybody around. I am strongly opposed to the absurd and cruel, endemic delays in the processing of immigrant visa applications, which Senator Kennedy could do something about

Perhaps it is time to start holding our respective congressional delegations accountable for fixing a decades old problem.

Senator Kennedy, what is your plan to fix the problem and why haven't you proposed a comprehensive immigration reform plan?

— John (@hcougar82) November 16, 2021

and have nothing whatever against Nigerian doctors.

Though I also think there should be more doctors, no doubt including Nigerian ones, in Nigeria, where there is a looming shortage—by 2030 they expect to have 50,000 fewer doctors than they need to care for the population, and three times as many nurses—and would like to see the US government do something about the way we basically steal billions of dollars from the countries that train the doctors who immigrate here, as found in this 2011 study:

Results In the nine source countries [Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe,] the estimated government subsidised cost of a doctor’s education ranged from $21 000 (£13 000; €15 000) in Uganda to $58 700 in South Africa. The overall estimated loss of returns from investment for all doctors currently working in the destination countries was $2.17bn (95% confidence interval 2.13bn to 2.21bn), with costs for each country ranging from $2.16m (1.55m to 2.78m) for Malawi to $1.41bn (1.38bn to 1.44bn) for South Africa. The ratio of the estimated compounded lost investment over gross domestic product showed that Zimbabwe and South Africa had the largest losses. The benefit to destination countries of recruiting trained doctors was largest for the United Kingdom ($2.7bn) and United States ($846m).

Conclusions Among sub-Saharan African countries most affected by HIV/AIDS, lost investment from the emigration of doctors is considerable. Destination countries should consider investing in measurable training for source countries and strengthening of their health systems.  

And Kennedy could play a role there, too, not that he will.

Meanwhile, my focus is on the openness of borders that is written into US statute law and the Geneva Convention,  on behalf of people suffering from governments much less responsible than Nigeria's, from Syria to El Salvador, wbich is not that "any gangbanger who can cross the river" can "come on in", but that anybody who enters the United States by any means (most arrive by air) is entitled to make a case for asylum before a duly constituted authority who can decide whether they are "gangbangers" or not, and the US has a reasonably complete idea "who's coming into our country" (or did before the Trump administration deliberately broke the system, which is now undergoing emergency repairs). 

Kennedy knows this very well and is lying about it, fluently, because he knows nobody on Fox News will call him on it, and no Democrats who can call him on it will get any attention; few of them understand the issue  and fewer of them can communicate it (especially to the press, which had no idea what Julián Castro was telling them in the 2020 campaign and no interest in finding out).

What Kennedy is talking about is President Biden's effort to get rid of one of the most dishonest and nasty maneuvers of the Trump administration, the "Title 42 expulsion", which enable the Customs and Border Patrol to refuse to give a hearing to asylum applications on public health grounds—the fear that people on the other side of the Mexican border could be bringing in COVID-19 virus, even though, as was well known at the time, the prevalence of COVID-19 was in fact far worse on the US side of the border. In other words, the (mostly Central American) asylum applicants were far more likely to catch COVID in Texas and Arizona than they were to give it to somebody else.

In short another pretext devised by Miller, Wolf, and Cuccinelli to evade the law. For purely political purposes—it's not as if Kennedy cares—of rousing Know-Nothing hostility.

So last Friday President Biden announced the end of the Title 42 expulsions ("If you don't have to wear masks," Biden didn't say, "I don't have to deport innocent victims of gang violence"), effective 23 May, to give CBP and the other entities time to prepare for what is certainly going to be a fairly big influx of asylum cases, for whom incidentally our country has TONS OF ROOM

"The peak population of Akron was in 1960, when its population was 290,351. In 1960, Akron was the 45th largest city in the US; now it's fallen to the 125th largest city in the US. Akron is currently 31.9% smaller than it was in 1960." You could use some immigrants, Gym.

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

But anyway, the move is in trouble, led by Republican Senators plus, of course, Manchin and Sinema (and, I'm very sorry to say, Hassan and Tester and Kelly), which Republicans will be trying to tank with stories of how chaotic and violent the situation at the border is, Kennedy no doubt among them.

Say everything you can, to whomever you can say it to. This really needs to be fixed, the entire system really needs to be fixed, even unto those Nigerian doctors, and it needs to be fixed well before November. We need people to fill all those crazy jobs Biden is creating with an unemployment rate of 3.7! We need people to work in garbage jobs as those who already are in them get recruited into the wind and solar and EV industries! Democratic senators who are working for it are working for a Republican victory in 2022. Tell them. I'll be saying more, and I trust Redhand will too.