In case you missed it, conservative firebrand Tomi Lahren, best known for her hateful attacks on immigrants on social media and on her favorite hate outlet Fox News, was recently called out about her own family’s immigration history on the popular daytime TV show The View. Specifically, Lahren was called out about the hypocrisy in her insistence that immigration to the United States should be based on academic merit and that once admitted, immigrants must learn to speak english so as to assimilate to American culture.
Turns out the hosts of CBS’ The View got their hands on a report by a researcher who dug into Lahren’s family history and found out that Lahren’s great grandmother came to the U.S. from Germany and that after 40 years of living here, she still spoke german. This means by Lahren’s own standards, her great grandmother was a bad immigrant who failed to assimilate to the U.S., and deserved to be sent back to her native Germany.
Lahren was asked on Fox and Friends to address the immigration hypocrisy charge. To her credit, she correctly stated what she is being called out for. Lahren said, “What she [the researcher] was hoping to do was trying to call me a hypocrite for believing in merit-based immigration. Again she failed miserably….” However after correctly laying out the accusation against her, Lahren wentoff on a tangent, deliberately sidestepping the central charge–that by her own standards, her great grandma , who never learnt english, is no different than the non english speaking immigrants she now greatly despises. True to form, Lahren’s Fox News buddies never pressed her on the central charge, instead allowing her to wiggle her way out of it.
It would be interesting if the same researcher who dug into Lahren’s family history would go back and also look into whether the said german-speaking great grandma or other Lahren’s ancestors were ever beneficiaries of federal government programs she now wants Trump to use as a basis of denying people green cards. My guess is more Tomi Lahren immigration hypocrisy will come to light .
Bottomline folks, immigration has always been a complex issue in America because we are a country of immigrants. Tomi Lahren is the latest but certainly won’t be the last of Republicans who continue to advocate harsh immigration policies that punish and malign the current crop of immigrants for things their own ancestors did when they first arrived here. Surely Tomi Lahren, if it was okay for your great grandma to speak german after living here for 40 years, a reasonable argument can be made that she wasn’t a merit-based immigrant and that maybe you should not be advocating for policies that pin assimilation to the ability to speak/learn english.
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