10 Thoughts on the President and the 'S---hole Countries'

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2. As a rule, a president of the United States should not label countries, let alone continents, "s---holes." I don't know what word the president actually used, but had he used the word "dysfunctional" instead of "s---hole," that actually might have been a service to the people of many of these countries. I have been to 20 African countries. Corruption is Africa's greatest single problem. That's why those who truly care about Africans, many of whom are terrific people, need to honestly describe the moral state of many or most African countries. What benefit is it to honest, hardworking Africans or Latin Americans or others to deny the endemic corruption of these societies?

As Guatemalan columnist Claudia Nunez wrote on Trump in the Guatemalan newspaper Siglio 21: "The epithets he uses to describe certain groups are unfortunate and exemplify the decadence of the current political scene. But he has also said things that are true, for example, that it is we citizens of migration countries who have accommodated ourselves to the need to export people, as we have calmly allowed excessive levels of corruption to grow for decades."


3. Though many wonderful immigrants come from the world's worst places, there is some connection between the moral state of an immigrant's country and the immigrant's contribution to America. According to data from the Center for Immigration Studies, 73 percent of households headed by Central American and Mexican immigrants use one or more welfare programs, as do 51 percent of Caribbean immigrants and 48 percent of African immigrants. Contrast that with 32 percent of East Asians and 26 percent of Europeans.

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