To my friends. I don't wear my politics on my sleeve. I was broadly liberal as a young man and have become much more conservative as an older man, a natural progression. I am terribly lucky to have been born in the USA but have traveled extensively throughout my life. I spent two years in France in my college years. In the last decade I've been privileged to travel to many third world countries for brief medical mission work. Uganda, Haiti, Nicaragua... I have many friends in the third world, second world and, of course, the first world.

I am writing to condemn President Trump's attack yesterday on refugees from certain areas as coming from "shithole countries". It was condescending and imperious and offensive in a way that few of his off the cuff remarks have been. Followed up by the suggestion that we should swap out the third world refugees with immigrants from "countries like Norway" reveals, to my ear, a racism that I had thought America had moved away from.

Our "people," as Mother used to say, were Scotch-Irish (not English like my Father's people). The term didn't mean much to me as a child but Mother was proud of her hard scrabble ancestry. These were 18th century inhabitants of the rough borderland between England and Scotland. Dirt farming, rules averse, hard drinking Protestants that the English sent to Northern Ireland as a check on the Catholic south of that country. In the decades prior to our Revolutionary War they came to America in waves, generally through Pennsylvania and Maryland. William Penn's folks were glad to have them, just not in his settled areas and kept them moving west to the Appalachians as a buffer with the Indians. The Scotch Irish streamed in and south along the foot hills and mountains looking for suitable places to live and farm and raise families. Settling in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia before moving west to Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama.. The music of the Appalachians and corn whiskey are traces of "our people".

Italians, Irish, Polish, Greeks, Vietnamese, to name only a few, have similar stories.

I want to let my friends in the third world know that President Trump did not speak for me yesterday. A great American, Martin Luther King, said he looked forward to a time when we could look beyond the color of a person's skin to the content of their character. The same can be said of looking beyond one's country of origin. I do not pretend to have a solution for US immigration policy, but we have been a country that welcomed refugees and immigrants and this must continue.

Rick Bolt
January 12, 2018