From “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by immigrants, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves from the calamity in their countries for all the hand-outs here, looking for welfare and school lunches, bandanna-headed freeloaders begging for a human connection under the star-spangled banner waving in the New Mexican night.
From “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” by Emily Dickinson:
Because I could not stop to help an immigrant, he kindly died for me.
From “Jesus Loves the Little Children”:
White and white and white and white, they are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
From “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe:
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each Hispanic person
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
“Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
To which I shall reply “‘Nevermore.’”
From “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou:
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Cuccinelli: Yes.
From “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks:
That’s not English.
From “A Day Without an Immigrant, Dallas, Texas” by Shin Yu Pai:
Hopefully that will happen soon.
From “The Pledge of Allegiance”:
One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all who fall in the above-$500,000 a year tax bracket, and whose names are not too Españolé or Middle-Eastern-y.
From “Borderbus” by Juan Felipe Herrera:
I don’t know who that is.
From “The United States Welcomes You” by Tracy K. Smith:
I like that one.
From “The Wall” by Pink Floyd, which is not American verse, but The Cooch insisted:
All in all, I, Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of Trump’s Citizenship and Immigration Services, am just another brick in the wall, one that will keep out undesirables and freeloaders, black and brown people, those tired, struggling masses yearning to be free from the civil wars 40 years of American foreign policy helped create, welfare queens, drug addicts, rapists, people who kneel during the National Anthem, non gun-owners, non Trump-supporters, non-Christians, and most importantly not a single person who spells his name like Jesus.
Paul Crenshaw is the author of the essay collections This One Will Hurt You, published by The Ohio State University Press, and This We’ll Defend, from the University of North Carolina Press. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Tin House, North American Review and Brevity, among others.
