Today, Transportation Secretary
Sean Duffy Claimed
seventeen thousand drivers
had failed his English test
and either lost or not
been able to obtain their licenses,
which to me sounds a whole
lot more like crowing than complaining,
leading me first to wonder
whether it were actually true
and second, even if it were,
how much of it is in fact
the kind of English applicable to driving?
Then I remembered how, right
after Katrina, hundreds of Mexicans
gathered up construction tools and supplies,
loaded them on trucks, drove
pell-mell to New Orleans and got
immediately to work, so
that the first phase of the rebuild
was basically all Mexican know-how and labor -
this in contrast to all the flimflammers,
gougers, and other American opportunists
who showed up in Homestead, Florida
some years earlier after Andrew.
Oh, and, by the way, Sean Duffy – and yes,
I can ask this, having myself some ancestry -
back in the 18402, had there been,
as later, immigration laws and quotas,
how many of the starving Irish do
you figure they’d have stopped or even slowed?
Then just what gives you and so
many other Irish-Americans license
(yeah, license!) to play the xenophobe?
David Stevenson
Farmington
