Take a look at this gentleman.
He was an immigrant to the United States of America. He grew up in southern Greece. He found his way to Pittsburgh, Pa. He got married and started family.
He worked hard. He played by the rules. He was a simple man. He had little formal education. He wasn’t destined to achieve financial wealth or become famous the way we understand the meaning of the term “famous.”
His name was Ioannis Panayotis Kanellopoulos. He shortened his last name to Kanelis; his first and middle names, translated to English, were John Peter.
He was my grandfather.
As I heard Donald J. Trump’s screed last night about immigration, one passage jumped out at me, grabbed me by the throat and damn near throttled me as I heard it.
Trump laid down some markers that legal immigrants needed to meet before they would be “selected” for entry into the United States of America.
My grandfather wouldn’t have met the standard set.
My Papou wouldn’t be welcome in a country where Donald J. Trump would serve as president.
He toiled in a steel mill in Pittsburgh. He lost his job when the Great Depression decimated the Rust Belt in the early 1930s. He and my grandmother and five of their children gravitated to Vermont, where they ran a hotel; that venture failed, too.
Papou and his family — which grew to seven children in Vermont — then moved west, to Portland, Ore.
My grandfather then shined shoes in the basement of a high-end downtown Portland department store for the rest of his working life.
Would he have been “selected”? It appeared to me, based on what I heard Trump say, he very well would have been turned away.
I wrote about it yesterday in the blog post attached below.
https://highplainsblogger.com/2016/09/select-immigrants-based-on-skill/
Were that to happen, the United States of America would have lost a great patriot.
Donald Trump’s arrogance as it related to immigrants — illegal and legal — has disgraced the American political process.
