Vice President Mike Pence, who once tried to ban Syrian refugees from Indiana, often lauds his Irish grandfather’s immigrant story. The grandfather, Richard Cawley, left Ireland in 1923, escaping a vicious civil war. Yet under rules in place at the time, Cawley would not have been allowed into the country had he been Chinese and likely would not have been able to get the job he did, as a streetcar driver, had he been black. And yet the New York Times quotes Pence addressing a group of Latino business leaders in March 2017, saying, “If you work hard, play by the rules, anybody can be anybody in
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