Cartoon: Africa Dumping Its “Wretched Refuse” On Europe

I suppose the cartoon above (source) with it’s trashcan metaphor will be considered racist, even though the artist hasn’t made much effort to make the dumpees look like Third-Worlders. (Of course, many Syrians look white–John Derbyshire, looking at photos of  the 9/11 hijackers said that  one of them, Wail al-Shehri, was  “the spitting image of a boy I went to school with — a boy of entirely English origins, whose name was Hobson”.

However, if the cartoonist’s trash metaphor is racist, so is Emma Lazarus’s oft-quoted call to take in the “wretched refuse” of 19th century Europe’s “teeming shore.”

So here, once again, is Jerry Seinfeld, on this subject:

I am for open immigration, but that sign we have on the front of the Statue of Liberty, “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…” can`t we just say, “Hey, the door`s open, we`ll take whoever you got”? Do we have to specify the wretched refuse? I mean, why don`t we just say, “Give us the unhappy, the sad, the slow, the ugly, people that can`t drive, that they have trouble merging, if they can`t stay in their lane, if they don`t signal, they can`t parallel park, if they`re sneezing, if they`re stuffed up, if they`re clogged, if they have bad penmanship, don`t return calls, if they have dandruff, food between their teeth, if they have bad credit, if they have no credit, missed a spot shaving, in other words any dysfunctional defective slob that you can somehow cattle prod onto a wagon, send them over, we want `em.”

Seinfeld,Episode 55 – The Visa

Broadcast date: January 27, 1993