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President Donald Trump and his administration have made their stance on immigrants quite clear, from racist rhetoric to the border wall. Most recently his administration proposed a significant increase in the time it takes for illegal immigrants or asylum-seekers to become eligible to receive a work permit — essentially doubling it from 180 days to 365 days. While many people understand those asylum seekers are escaping dangerous situations back in their home countries, others view this situation as a full-blown migrant crisis – like this Twitter user.

User @DFBHarvard tweeted out an explanation of immigration that compared immigrants to home invaders, while some may support his stance, another internet user was quick to call him out on the racism-filled post using his own analogy.

Twitter user Daniel Baranowski went viral for his racist tweet on immigration – but another user found the perfect way to shut him down


Image credits: DFBHarvard

Baranowski is a retired professor in Healthcare Management & Policy as well as a conservative Trump supporter. Despite listing himself as a historian in his bio, the former professor received a history lesson in “home invasion” and racism in America from user @BitchWithA_W who served him the best comeback on his own argument.

Image credits: BitchWithA_W

Wampanoag means People of the First Light. They have inhabited the east coast of what is now Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, to as far as Bristol and Warren, Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years. Today there are about 4,000-5,000 Wampanoag living in New England. The Wampanoag have three primary groups – Mashpee, Aquinnah, and Manomet. The Mashpee Wampanoag were re-acknowledged as a federally recognized tribe in 2007, and in 2015 the federal government declared 150 acres of land in Mashpee and 170 acres of land in Taunton as the Tribe’s initial reservation, on which the Tribe can exercise its full tribal sovereignty rights.

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This Twitter user was not the only person to call out Baranowski on racial discrimination. Someone did some digging and found that he had some immigrant roots of his own.

Image credits: CleverTitleTK

Journalist and genealogist, Jennifer Mendelsohn found and posted census records that showed the former professor’s great-grandfather was a Polish immigrant who, when he arrived, reportedly spoke no English. Polish immigration to the U.S exploded at the turn of the 20th-century due to imperial repression, land shortages, and chronic unemployment. The 1910 census recorded more than 900,000 new immigrants who spoke Polish. It is estimated that more than 2 million Poles had immigrated to the country by the 1920s.

Mendelsohn, an expert in genealogy, told Bored Panda she sees very few differences between the cause of immigration in generations past and now: “America has always prided itself on being a place that welcomed people looking for opportunity and/or to escape hardships and oppression. What also hasn’t changed is the demonization of immigrants and the mythologizing that immigrants of past generations were somehow better or more desirable.”

People in the comments were quick to point out all the flaws in the racist analogy

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Baranowski’s hypocritical stance is not new according to the researcher, “This is an old American tradition, going back to Benjamin Franklin’s 1751 essay complaining about the Germans, with their “swarthy” complexions and how they would never learn to speak English or properly assimilate,” Mendelsohn explained, “The group that’s already in always seems to want to forget where they came from and shut the door on the next.”

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English was not always a requirement for the citizenship process, “The requirement to speak English in order to be naturalized was instituted as part of the Naturalization Act of 1906,” she said. President Theodore Roosevelt was the one who revised the Naturalization Act of 1870 and added the requirement that immigrants learn English in order to be naturalized citizens. This bill was passed on June 29, 1906, and took effect on September 27, 1906.

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