On the Thursday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President Dump asked a bipartisan gathering in the Oval Office why the United States should accept people from “shithole countries” in Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean. He also asked, “What do we want Haitians here for?” He added: “We should have people here from Norway.”
As we all know, this is not the first time the president has made disparaging comments about minorities, immigrants, and foreigners and expressed fuzziness about global policy.
First, does he know that Norway is a socialist country? I have another question. Why would Norwegians want to come to America? They have access to free health care, free postsecondary education, and its sovereign wealth fund created by profits from North Sea oil (https://www.nbim.no), which is owned by its people, recently topped ONE TRILLION dollars. http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/19/investing/norway-pension-fund-trillion-dollars/index.html. Norway has a national pension. In 2017, Norway moved to first as the happiest country in the world (up from fourth in 2016), according the United Nations (http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017). Chapter 7 explains why the United States’ happiness index has fallen over the last decade. A country’s happiness is not only measured in economic terms, but also social.elements like how fellow countrymen fare (think safety net).
If Martin Luther King were alive today, I believe he would be speaking out against injustices while advocating for peace, minorities, immigrants, and foreigners. Like he wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
