April 27, 2013

NYT: American nativism and a too slow path to citizenship denied Tamerlan his American Dream, turning him into a terrorist

"Tamerlan Tsarnaev, right, lost at the Golden Gloves championships in 2009.
A year later, a new citizenship rule blocked him." -- NY Times
You may have been musing that we would have been spared all this mayhem in Boston if we had had a stronger immigration system to keep out undesirables. But, the New York Times explains in a front page story, you've got it all backwards. It's not the immigrants' fault that they blew up the Boston Marathon, it's our fault for not embracing the immigrants more quickly in their quest for the American Dream. 

According to the NYT, if only Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been granted U.S. citizenship faster or if American organizations weren't occasionally prejudiced in favor of American citizens, all the recent unpleasantness could have been avoided. 

Nativism, that's the real problem.

I'll quote at length from this NYT article (not an editorial or op-ed) because it's a classic example of the reigning mindset:
Before Bombs, a Battered American Dream 
By DEBORAH SONTAG, DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and SERGE F. KOVALESKI 
BOSTON — It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen. 
The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin, had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant. 
From one year to the next, though, the tournament rules had changed, disqualifying legal permanent residents — not only Mr. Tsarnaev, who was Soviet-born of Chechen and Dagestani heritage, but several other New England contenders, too. His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction. 
Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge to Dagestan showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift. 
His trajectory eventually led the frustrated athlete and his loyal younger brother, Dzhokhar, to bomb one of the most famous athletic events in this country, killing three and wounding more than 200 at the Boston Marathon, the authorities say. They say it led Mr. Tsarnaev, his application for citizenship stalled, and his brother, a new citizen and a seemingly well-adjusted college student, to attack their American hometown on Patriots’ Day, April 15. 
Mr. Tsarnaev now lies in the state medical examiner’s office, his body riddled with bullets after a confrontation with the police four days after the bombings. He left behind an American-born wife who had converted to Islam, a 3-year-old daughter with curly hair, a 19-year-old brother charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, and a puzzle: Why did these two young men seemingly turn on the country that had granted them asylum? 
Examining their lives for clues, the authorities have focused on Mr. Tsarnaev’s six-month trip to the Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan last year. But in Cambridge, sitting on the front steps of the ramshackle, brown-shingled house where the Tsarnaev family lived for a decade, their 79-year-old landlady urged a longer lens. 
“He certainly wasn’t radicalized in Dagestan,” the landlady, Joanna Herlihy, said. 
Ms. Herlihy, who speaks Russian and was friends with the Tsarnaevs, said she told law enforcement officials that his trip clearly merited scrutiny. But she said that Mr. Tsarnaev’s embrace of Islam had grown more intense before that. 
As his religious identification grew fiercer, Mr. Tsarnaev seemed to abandon his once avid pursuit of the American dream. He dropped out of community college and lost interest not just in boxing but also in music; he used to play piano and violin, classical music and rap, and his e-mail address was a clue to how he once saw himself: The_Professor@real-hiphop.com. He worked only sporadically, sometimes as a pizza deliverer, and he grew first a close-cropped beard and then a flowing one. 
He seemed isolated, too. Since his return from Dagestan, he, his wife and his child were the only Tsarnaevs living full time in the three-bedroom apartment on Ms. Herlihy’s third floor. 
Mr. Tsarnaev’s two younger sisters had long since married and moved out; his parents, now separated, had returned to Dagestan, his mother soon after a felony arrest on shoplifting charges; and his brother had left for the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, returning home only on the occasional weekend, as he did recently after damaging his 1999 green Honda Civic by texting while driving. 
“When Dzhokhar used to come home on Friday night from the dormitory, Tamerlan used to hug him and kiss him — hold him, like, because he was a big, big boy, Tamerlan,” their mother, Zubeidat, 45, said last week, adding that her older son had been “handsome like Hercules.” 
Not long after he gave up his boxing career, Mr. Tsarnaev married Katherine Russell of Rhode Island in a brief Islamic ceremony at a Dorchester mosque in June 2010. She has declined to speak publicly since the attacks. 
His wife primarily supported the family through her job as a home health aide, scraping together about $1,200 a month to pay the rent. While she worked, Mr. Tsarnaev looked after their daughter, Zahira, who was learning to ride the tricycle still parked beside the house, neighbors said. The family’s income was supplemented by public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to November 2012, state officials said. 
It was probably not the life that Anzor Tsarnaev had imagined for his oldest child, who, even as a boy, before he developed the broad-shouldered physique that his mother described as “a masterpiece,” dreamed of becoming a famous boxer. 
But then the father’s life had not gone as planned, either. Once an official in the prosecutor’s office in Kyrgyzstan, he had been reduced to working as an unlicensed mechanic in the back lot of a rug store in Cambridge. ...
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born on Oct. 21, 1986, five years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in Kalmykia, a barren stretch of Russian territory by the Caspian Sea. A photograph of him as a baby shows a cherubic child wearing a knit cap with a pompom, perched on the lap of his unsmiling mother, who has spiky black bangs and an artful pile of hair. Strikingly, she did not cover her head then, as she does now; she began wearing a hijab only a few years ago, in the United States, prodded by her son just as she was prodding him, too, to deepen his faith. ...
Finally, Anzor Tsarnaev sought political asylum in the United States. He arrived first, with his younger son, in the spring of 2002. His older son, a young man of 16, followed with the rest of the family in July 2003. 
Their neighborhood in Cambridge was run-down, with car repair lots where condominiums have since arisen. But the city has long been especially welcoming to immigrants and refugees; its high school has students from 75 countries. 
The schools superintendent, Jeffrey Young, described Cambridge as “beyond tolerant.” 
“How is it that someone could grow up in a place like this and end up in a place like that?” he said of the Tsarnaevs. 
Unlike his little brother, who was well integrated into the community by the time he started high school, Mr. Tsarnaev was a genuine newcomer when he entered the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, from which he graduated in 2006. Enrolled in the large English as a Second Language program, he made friends mostly with other international students, and his demeanor was reserved, one former classmate, Luis Vasquez, said. 
“The view on him was that he was a boxer and you would not want to mess with him,” Mr. Vasquez, now 25 and a candidate for the Cambridge City Council, said. “He told me that he wanted to represent the U.S. in boxing. He wanted to do the Olympics and then turn pro.” 
... During a preliminary round of the New England Golden Gloves in 2010, in a breach of boxing etiquette, he entered the locker room to taunt not only the fighter he was about to face but also the fighter’s trainer. Wearing a cowboy hat and alligator-skin cowboy boots, he gave the two men a disdainful once-over and said: “You’re nothing. I’m taking you down.” 
The trainer, Hector Torres, was furious and subsequently lodged a complaint, arguing that Mr. Tsarnaev should not be allowed to participate in the competition because he was not a citizen. 

So, Hector Torres is the American nativist who, when you think about it, is really the one responsible for all those people getting blown up.
As it happened, Golden Gloves of America was just then changing its policy. It used to permit legal immigrants to compete in its national tournament three out of every four years, barring them only during Olympic qualifying years, James Beasley, the executive director, said. But it decided in 2010 that the policy was confusing and moved to end all participation by noncitizens in the Tournament of Champions. 
So Mr. Tsarnaev, New England heavyweight champion for the second year in a row, was stymied. The immigrant champions in three other weight classes in New England were blocked from advancing, too, Mr. Russo said. 
Mr. Tsarnaev was devastated. He was not getting any younger. And he was more than a year away from being even eligible to apply for American citizenship, and there appeared to be a potential obstacle in his path. 
The previous summer, Mr. Tsarnaev had been arrested after a report of domestic violence. 
His girlfriend at the time had called 911, “hysterically crying,” to say he had beaten her up, according to the Cambridge police report. Mr. Tsarnaev told the officers that he had slapped her face because she had been yelling at him about “another girl.” 
Eventually, charges against him would be dismissed, the records show, so the episode would not have endangered his eventual citizenship application.

Because we all know that when girlfriends eventually drop charges of domestic violence it's because they were lying from the get-go. We can't have fanatical feminist theories about abuse standing in the way of immigrants getting citizenship, now can we?

By the way, the phrase "American Dream," as in "Before Bombs, a Battered American Dream," has become the "vibrant" of the 2010s: near guaranteed evidence that somebody is yanking your chain.

Update: The NYT has changed the title of the article to "A Battered Dream, Then a Violent Path."

66 comments:

  1. Sontag, Herszenhorn and Kovaleski. What?

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  2. I think I know what Jews are up to. They really don't want more Chechens/Muslims either, but they don't want to seem 'xenophobic'. So, even as they make grumbling PC noises, they really won't resist Republican-led measures to curtail immigration from Muslim areas, and of course, SUCH restrictions are already in place.

    So, libs speak loud enough to take moral credit but not loud enough to ensure massive Muslim immigration to the US.

    Same thing with racial profiling in NY. Libs speak up about it loudly enough to seem conscientious but not loudly enough to bring an end to it.

    It's like what cons are now doing with 'gay marriage'. Loudly enough to maintain cred as conservatives but not loudly enough to lead the fight against it.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TggLQHVcV_U

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  3. Sontag, Herszenhorn and Kovaleski. What?

    Don't leave out the landlord, Joanna Herlihy.

    “He certainly wasn’t radicalized in Dagestan,” she said.

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  4. One phrase reverberated through my head as I read that article: "none dare call it treason."

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  5. This is disgusting.. I have had several people tell me that the terrorists were "Russians", and then express surprise when i tell them they were muslims.

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  6. The facts in this article actually highlight the economic destruction that immigration has wrought upon the men of our country. Ironically, Tamerlan and his father were victims of immigration as well. This is really a story about the massive labor oversupply in our country, the lack of dignified and self-sustaining work opportunities that has resulted from it, and about how immigrants are squeezing people out of their own habitat.

    It is more plausible to argue that mass immigration was the cause of Tamerlan's violent act--because it depressed economic opportunities for his father as it has for all Americans--than to argue that immigration restriction was the cause.

    Exhibit A (Tamerlan): [Tamerlan] worked only sporadically, sometimes as a pizza deliverer, and he grew first a close-cropped beard and then a flowing one.

    Exhibit B (the Father): But then the father’s life had not gone as planned, either. Once an official in the prosecutor’s office in Kyrgyzstan, he had been reduced to working as an unlicensed mechanic in the back lot of a rug store in Cambridge.

    Exhibit C (More evidence as to harm to other American men): So Mr. Tsarnaev, New England heavyweight champion for the second year in a row, was stymied. The immigrant champions in three other weight classes in New England were blocked from advancing, too, Mr. Russo said. [Immigrants who had robbed Americans of athletic glory in their own country.]

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  7. He lashed out because his boxing career was thwarted? Such nonsense. Nothing stopped him from turning professional if that was what he wanted, citizen or not. He was already getting a little old to be in the amateurs; if he was going to turn pro he would've needed to do so right about the point at which he stopped, about age 24 or earlier like around 21. He just didn't have what it took, despite his grandiose illusions. So the big strong heavyweight fighter couldn't even hold a regular job, or didn't want to. Sounds like they're trying to humanize him but in the end he comes off as an arrogant jerk.

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  8. Hashashins would often assimilate themselves in the towns and regions of their targets and, over time, stealthily insert themselves into strategic positions.

    Immigration--a cautionary tale.

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  9. Not surprised that the NYT would come out up with this excuse, a pathetic excuse. If a non citizen living in America decides to bomb a marathon just because he is not allowed to box, then he should never have given citizenship, only the most lunatic left winger could ever think otherwise.

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  10. Hector Torres at it again?!

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  11. Because we all know that when girlfriends eventually drop charges of domestic violence it's because they were lying from the get-go. We can't have fanatical feminist theories about abuse standing in the way of immigrants getting citizenship, now can we?

    In the hierarchy of victimhood race trumps gender.

    The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin, had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant.

    What about this decision ? I'd like to know a bit more about these judges - possibly raaaacist ? There was booing in the crowd so there must have been something fishy going on...

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  12. Correction to 3:31 pm anonymous post:

    It is more plausible to argue that mass immigration was the cause of Tamerlan's violent act--because it depressed economic opportunities for TAMERLAN AND his father as it has for all Americans--than to argue that immigration restriction was the cause.

    Bottom line is that there is a good chance Tamerlan wouldn't have done this is the job opportunities in America weren't, for so many men, so miserable.

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  13. Sontag, Herszenhorn and Kovaleski. What?

    And Herlihy!

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  14. The family I grew up in probably would have qualified for reduced price or free lunches and food stamps nowadays - 4 kids, father a truck driver who got laid off occasionally. We had peanut butter sandwiches for lunch every day. I still love peanut butter. The family next door to us lived in the rented basement and the dad worked 2 jobs.

    Tamerlan was a monster so its hard to say that the welfare mooching is at the root of the problem with him but it sure sticks out like a sore thumb that he was a typical low-character welfare moocher.

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  15. Have you no sense of decency, Gray Lady? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

    If the guy had any real future in boxing twenty-three with an extensive amateur record means he's already running late to go pro.

    Despite having worked hard to succeed in the Golden Gloves, once that was over he settled in to put the mother of his toddler out to work--so the guy wasn't so much lazy as he was disdainful of honest work and fond of fighting. So he fits the Checheny pattern of being not so much lazy as disdainful of honest work and fond of fighting.
    And then there's the woman-beating.

    I wonder if it troubles Ms Sontag et al, betraying their putative feminism so openly?
    You know they ignore the stereotypical behavior of the who with the same rigor they seek to highlight that of the whom, even if it's ambiguous.
    If it was a working class white Christian with a similar history they would be painting us a picture of a loser made resentful by his failures, blaming everybody but himself.

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  16. So Mr. Tsarnaev, New England heavyweight champion for the second year in a row, was stymied. The immigrant champions in three other weight classes in New England were blocked from advancing, too, Mr. Russo said.

    Mr. Tsarnaev was devastated.


    According to whom? Does the NYT have any source at all for this claim as to Tsarnoff's mental state?

    The previous summer, Mr. Tsarnaev had been arrested after a report of domestic violence.

    So by the Times own reporting, Tamerlan's "issues" actually began before he became ineligible for the tournament.

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  17. If it was a working class white Christian with a similar history they would be painting us a picture of a loser made resentful by his failures, blaming everybody but himself.

    Yep. This could easily have been spun in that manner. Another narrative, noted by a commenter above, is that Tamerlan was a victim of the poor job prospects and growing economic inequality that is facing many men in the United States.

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  18. Tamerlan was a monster so its hard to say that the welfare mooching is at the root of the problem with him but it sure sticks out like a sore thumb that he was a typical low-character welfare moocher.

    Times have changed. Is there any longer such a person as a welfare moocher?

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  19. If we don't give in to every demand of macho pothead Muslim refugees then the terrorists will have won

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  20. Women love wife/girlfriend beaters as long as they are dominant. See Chris Brown. Tamerlan. Heck the Fifty Shades of Grey hero.

    The FT has an editorial by Chris Caldwell, noting how one academic wants either all the Third World to be sent to the First World, or every "unfair" Middle/Working class person who is White to send money to the Third World. Because its unfair or something. And who do you think is going to be the middleman?

    Its a scam. Nothing more. Nothing less. The whole point is to recreate the dream society of the elites (and most women) -- an aristocratic society of hereditary privilege. It goes over like Disney Princesses and Dan Brown.

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  21. If only Hitler had gotten into art school. Those art teachers are responsible for the war.

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  22. Auntie Analogue4/27/13, 8:32 PM


    Tamerlan, according to the New York Times: "[A] flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin." Nice threads to be "partial to" when you're living off the American taxpayers' welfare gravy train and living off your airhead convert-to-Islam wife's 80-hour work week.

    "'He certainly wasn’t radicalized in Dagestan,'" said his landlady, who speaks Russian. How does an Irish-surnamed woman come to speak Russian? Is Ms. Herlihy another one of the Russian immigrant women who married a U.S. citizen to scam herself into citizenship? Of course Tamerlan was "radicalized" in Dagestan - he spent the first four-fifths of his life there, getting his head dunked in Islam and Dagestani truculence.

    "They say it [disqualification from boxing for lack of U.S. citizenship] led Mr. Tsarnaev, his application for citizenship stalled, and his brother, a new citizen and a seemingly well-adjusted college student, to attack their American hometown on Patriots’ Day." Since when is an American city the "hometown" of anyone foreign-born?

    "Why did these two young men seemingly turn on the country that had granted them asylum?" "Seemingly"? Really? Do you New York Times' authors mean to say that this warm fuzzy feeling duo only "seemed" to murder four people? Wouldn't that have been...unseemly?

    "His wife primarily supported the family through her job as a home health aide, scraping together about $1,200 a month to pay the rent." Which calls to mind the old folk song: "I Know You Rider gonna miss me when I'm gone."

    "The immigrant champions in three other weight classes in New England were blocked from advancing, too." Well, you can have knocked me over with a feather.

    "Hector Torres." If he's another illegal immigrant, how many of us would stand in line to have a shot at hectoring Torres right out of our country?

    "Mr. Tsarnaev was devastated." - But he wasn't in any way harmed, let alone was he MURDERED.

    "The previous summer, Mr. Tsarnaev had been arrested after a report of domestic violence." Found himself locked out of the gym - needed urgently to find a punching bag?

    "[C]harges against him would be dismissed....so the episode would not have endangered his eventual citizenship application." So the extraordinary step of dismissing felony assault charges against him to keep him qualified for citizenship proves that we "nativists" are just not welcoming enough doormats for Third Worlders who come here?

    Do these New York Times authors have even the slightest clue to how their writing strikes anyone who can THINK?

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  23. Anonymous said:I think I know what Jews are up to. They really don't want more Chechens/Muslims either, but they don't want to seem 'xenophobic'. So, even as they make grumbling PC noises, they really won't resist Republican-led measures to curtail immigration from Muslim areas, and of course, SUCH restrictions are already in place.

    Yup, you nailed it. Part of what drives this whole mess is the fact that our public policy debate is being driven by people who act like students jostling for their Professor's approval. It's a truly sick competition to see who is the cleverest, most counter intuitive little sycophant.

    I am fed up with public "intellectuals" who treat deadly serious, and even existential maters as if they where consequence free opportunities for verbal peacocking. The play acting needs to stop.

    -The Judean People's Front

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  24. Please note that the American Dream he was stymied in was not of getting a stable job to support his wife and child, it was of becoming a national boxing champion. There are so many jobs, like plumbing eg, that can be done by reasonably able men that there is no excuse, even if he was kept away from the Golden Gloves by overt ethnocentrism or xenophobia, which isn't apparent at all.

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  25. Looks like the NYT has Stockholm Syndrome.

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  26. ATTENTION on IMMIGRATION:

    Rubio has put up a site asking for comments on how to "improve" the amnesty bill.

    Please visit this link and submit your comments. Be reasonable and polite:

    http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/help-us-improve-the-bill?ID=beb53cf6-7c87-4ada-9828-1c3a0b150537#Comments_beb53cf6-7c87-4ada-9828-1c3a0b150537

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  27. "The schools superintendent, Jeffrey Young, described Cambridge as “beyond tolerant.”
    “How is it that someone could grow up in a place like this and end up in a place like that?” he said of the Tsarnaevs."

    Oh my! How can someone come from nowhwere to the center of the universe and not love us? How can you not admire our liberatlity in tolerating you?

    Your traditions are awesome - as food for our grad student programs. (Your not supposed to acutally kill people in Cambridge!?!!)

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  28. The writers of that piece don't believe a word they're saying--they simply figure there will be libs reading the NYTimes who do.

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  29. You're right. NYT is becoming The Onion.

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  30. If it was a working class white Christian with a similar history they would be painting us a picture of a loser made resentful by his failures, blaming everybody but himself.

    Right. And they would have gone to town on the wife beating.

    Imagine what the MSM would make of a Christian sect with the same traits as Islam - they would be portrayed as worse than Fred Phelps.

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  31. Simon in London4/28/13, 2:07 AM

    The NYT - the Fount of Filth.

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  32. "According to the NYT, if only Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been granted U.S. citizenship faster or if American organizations weren't occasionally prejudiced in favor of American citizens, all the recent unpleasantness could have been avoided."

    So those 10-20 million mexican illegal aliens who may, or may not, be put "on a path to citizenship" are all just ticking time-bombs? Sounds like a good reason to deport them all.

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  33. The immigrant story used to go something like this: Brian O'Shea trades all his belongings for passage in the hold of a ship headed for America. He arrives with little more than the clothes on his back and a piece of paper holding an address. The people at that address -- fellow immigrants from his native country -- put him up while he works at a sweatshop to pay them rent and save up a bit. When he has enough for a train ticket to Chicago and a new suit, he heads halfway across the country. In Chicago, he again makes connections with some fellow immigrants and finds a job at a slaughterhouse. He works long hours and lives as cheaply as possible until he can afford a small apartment of his own and passage across the Atlantic for his wife or childhood sweetheart. Communication with his fatherland is limited to a few letters a year. Eventually, if everything goes well, he's able to settle his family into a working-class lifestyle and work toward providing something better for his children.

    Now, keep in mind that we used to be proud of this process -- sweatshops and all. Of course, sometimes it didn't go nearly that well -- families got separated and never united, people drowned on the way over, and so on. Yet we were proud that our ancestors went through such travails and didn't give up (let alone kill some people out of frustration). We even considered those travails to be part of what made them and this country great.

    Today the "refugee" arrives on a plane ticket provided by friends at one government department or other. They've also arranged for a job (if he wants one) and made sure he's aware of all the welfare programs and other benefits available to him. Various government and charitable agencies will fight over the opportunity to help him succeed, with English training and other education, and help finding everything from jobs to social opportunities. He lives a middle-class lifestyle at worst, and has plenty of time and money to pursue his hobbies.

    Now we, descendants of the guy in the first paragraph, are supposed to feel guilty about the treatment of the guy in the last one? You've gotta be kidding me.

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  34. So it seems the lesson here is that if an immigrant finds it more difficult to become a famous athlete in this country than they originally anticipated, it is really society's fault for not bending over backwards to accommodate him. And if the immigrant resorts to terrorism, it is really the fault of society, not the immigrant. Even if the immigrant lived in the very heart of ultra-liberal intellectual America.

    That seems to be what this implies, which isn't so strange since the NY Times and liberals in general have been making similar excuses for the very high rate of black criminality since forever. Since society is so "racist", it just makes sense that blacks would have to resort to crime; society is so "xenophobic", if immigrants resort to terrorism as revenge, it makes perfect sense.

    But then if this makes perfect sense, why was almost entire left crossing their fingers hoping the Boston terrorist attacks were carried out by white racists or tea-partiers?

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  35. sumdood at 3:19 said: Don't leave out the landlord, Joanna Herlihy.

    Hunsdon: Her name sounds more Irish than Scots-Irish. Yes, yes, I know. What?

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  36. Can we stop referring to members of this revolting family as 'hot'. What's wrong with you Americans? Django's eyes are too close together, his mother would be hairy as buggery. To hell with the lot of them. The scourge of our age.

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  37. @Cail... Immigrants needed a sponser, and couldn´t be dirt poor destitute. Ellis Island was tough too.

    Just because immigrants looked bad in their pictures, doesn´t mean they were starving. Look at these Chechens for example, he was healthy enough to become a boxer, even though in their picture they look like they came from the stone age.

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  38. With this article in the Times, I can honestly say we've departed from the ridiculous and officially arrived at insanity.

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  39. "Robert De Pacino" is spot on! Hilarious.

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  40. Shouldn't 20 million illegals all be setting off bombs?

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  41. >Sontag, Herszenhorn and Kovaleski. What?<

    Nowadays I read the byline first. It saves a great deal of time.

    Always ask first, "WHO is telling me x?" Not WHAT is x. Sad way to proceed, but probably the best strategy in this period of post-civilization.

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  42. the best young swimmer in the world, vlad morozov, is doing exactly the same thing. a russian citizen who is very close to getting his american citizenship so he can swim for the US at the world championships and olympics. he will definitely, definitely take a spot away from americans once this happens. my brother has talked to him and he's determined to do this, even after swimming for russia at the 2012 olympics and winning a bronze medal in the 400 free relay.

    of course he's a good guy, and will graduate from USC with his undergrad degree next year. he's not a muslim or a bomber. if the US decides to not grant him citizenship, he's not going to stop swimming, drift off in life, and eventually turn around and bomb rodeo drive in LA. he'll just keep swimming for russia, and possibly breaking the world record in the 100 meters in a few years.

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  43. tamerlan could have turned pro at any time. nothing blocked him from that. and he could have started earning money that way. 500 bucks a match to start. 1000 after that if he wins his first couple.

    not enough to live on, but it's a start. once he had won 10 matches he would have moved up to a couple thousand dollars per match, then he would be close to scraping out a living just boxing, if he took 4 matches a year or so. if he had won 15 or 20 matches in a few years, he probably could work his way up to being a contender for a minor belt, matches like that are worth probably 50 grand for the challenger.

    very much doubt he was even that good though. he looks like a career circuit pro, making his 5 grand per match a few times a year, if that. he's not at all a potential future contender for a major belt. wladimir klitschko was just offered a purse of 23 million dollars for a match with alexander povetkin. we aren't talking about anywhere near this level of boxing.

    he was 24, that's usually the time an amateur who is not one of the best in the world, would already be turning pro. most amateurs who are not gonna be advancing far in the olympic tournament turn pro by 21 or 22.

    these days some of the top amateurs in the world will stay amateur all the way to 28 or 29, so they can try to win the world championship or the olympic championship more than once, like roberto cammarelle, who boxed in the olympics 3 times (and was probably robbed of the gold in 2012 by 2 or 3 points thanks to hometown british judging). he is scheduled to make his pro debut this year. he TKO'd david price in the amateurs, who is now 15-1 as a pro and making, oh, at least 200 grand per match in the UK.

    anthony joshua, the eventual olympic champion in 2012, is 23, and would normally be turning pro now, but has said he wants to stay amateur until 2016 so he can box in the olympics again, then turn pro.

    some of them never turn pro. but most of the really good ones do. maybe tamerlan saw himself as a career amateur, never intending to become professional. and not being allowed to box amateur in the US anymore derailed that goal. i figure he could have tried to box amateur for russia at that point, but he knows he would not have made the team.

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  44. speaking of boxers from that area, there is timur ibragimov, and his cousin sultan ibragimov.

    timur is the proper name of tamerlane, although timur ibragimov is a turk and not a daegestani. timur boxed for minor belts.

    sultan is a daegestani though, and was the better boxer, winning the WBO belt. so there is a history of boxers from the caucasus.

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  45. Because we all know that when girlfriends eventually drop charges of domestic violence it's because they were lying from the get-go. We can't have fanatical feminist theories about abuse standing in the way of immigrants getting citizenship, now can we?

    Yeah, pretty ironic given what Sontag has written before. I guess you've got to learn to prioritize when you write for the NY Times.

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  46. Nice fighting close in the photo. So why is he wearing capris?

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  47. Incredible how the discussion of anything around here slides into ridiculous anti-semitic conspiracy theories almost immediately.

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  48. I see there was no comments section for the piece.

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  49. As Chris Berman might say,

    "WHAT?!?!?!?!?! You gotta be kiddin' me."

    Yep. Liberal hillbillies.

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  50. Anonymous @ 11:31 said "How can someone come from nowhwere to the center of the universe and not love us?"

    Ah, the typical liberal delusion. That everyone loves and wants to be like them, after all, who wouldn't?

    More mischief is done because liberals refuse to believe that e.g. blacks, or in this case muslim immigrants, don't really want to be what liberals think they should want to be. It is impossible for a liberal to acknowledge that these guys wanted to do exactly what they did. Or that black people, having gained their "freedom" in 1965 have set about creating just the type of society in their inner cities in which they want to live.

    Try to tell a liberal that "Uhhh, black people don't want to be like you. Just listen to the lyrics of their music and you'll see that to them, you're a chump. So all your efforts at reaching out and equality are in vain." and you will be met with vehement denial. It's their core belief.

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  51. Since Tamerlan's amature boxing career was stymied, and since he was was such a good boxer, then why not turn pro, make a ton of money, live the American Dream, and not blow people up.

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  52. The neocons who run the media may propote immigration in part because they WANT an Islamic terrorist attack so that Americans will invade another one of israel's enemies in the middle east. By constantly obsessing about terrorism in the media they are inspiring copycats.

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  53. Anyone else here old enough to remember the derision heaped on Jeane Kirkpatrick for saying, "They always blame American first", coining the Blame America First Crowd meme? I guess it still cuts too close.

    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/03/the_blameamericafirst_crowd.html

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  54. I say we blame the art academy for not admitting Hitler. You see, Hitler just felt dejected and sort of lost it. All he wanted was to be accepted by the art community.

    And the reason why conservatives are so bitter and angry and won't sign onto the globalist agenda is because too many of them are kept out of elite academia, media, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and etc.
    So, if liberals want conservatives to be happier and less hostile, they should open up the institutions they control to conservatives just like US should open up its borders to all the angry people around the world.

    Let me attend Harvard and then be given a job where I rake in million a year, and I'll be a nice liberal.

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  55. So, was this older brother a lover of the Southie Irish?

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  56. Incredible how the discussion of anything around here slides into ridiculous anti-semitic conspiracy theories almost immediately.

    What would you consider a "ridiculous anti-semitic conspiracy theory"?

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  57. The younger brother wrote "free Palestine" on Twitter so he was obviously upset about america's favoritism towards Israel. You won't read that in the NY Times.

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  58. "Incredible how the discussion of anything around here slides into ridiculous anti-semitic conspiracy theories almost immediately."

    There are literally 1000s of Jewish pundits in the MSM who say what's best for America: unlimited mass immigration and diversity, is the exact opposite of what they think is best for Israel: strict ethno-nationalism.

    It's the most blatant conspiracy in history but ironically most white Americans aren't ethno-centric enough to notice.

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  59. "the best young swimmer in the world, vlad morozov, is doing exactly the same thing. a russian citizen who is very close to getting his american citizenship so he can swim for the US at the world championships and olympics. he will definitely, definitely take a spot away from americans once this happens."

    What is this guy doing here? I am so sick of this country letting all these people in. Everybody just come to America.

    We win the cold war and he gets to come here and live in this country and take a spot from an American. Am I supposed to think he represents me?

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  60. There is shoplifting, and then there is Chechen shoplifting:

    Before leaving Boston, she was charged with shoplifting more than $1,600 worth of dresses at a Lord & Taylor store in Natick, according to police records.

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  61. Sumdood said: Incredible how the discussion of anything around here slides into ridiculous anti-semitic conspiracy theories almost immediately.

    Hunsdon translated: "Shut up," sumdood said.

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  62. alonzo portfolio4/29/13, 12:14 PM

    Well, I see the black physical superiority deniers are out in full force, as usual. Look at that height and reach advantage Tammy had. Boy, you don't see a disparity like that too often. And that black guy doesn't exactly look like he's been doing his roadwork, either. Dave in Hackensack, what say you?

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  63. "Well, I see the black physical superiority deniers are out in full force, as usual. Look at that height and reach advantage Tammy had. Boy, you don't see a disparity like that too often. And that black guy doesn't exactly look like he's been doing his roadwork, either. Dave in Hackensack, what say you?"

    Racist referee?

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  64. Well, I see the black physical superiority deniers are out in full force, as usual. Look at that height and reach advantage Tammy had. Boy, you don't see a disparity like that too often. And that black guy doesn't exactly look like he's been doing his roadwork, either. Dave in Hackensack, what say you?

    Horses are physically superior to blacks.

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  65. Horses are physically superior to blacks.

    Says who?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlfCLnxtew8

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