Message To GOP: “Every Day Yu Goad Donkey, One Day Him Gwine Kick Yu”

By Felicia J. Persaud

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. June 17, 2016: Jamaican immigrants, now the largest black immigrant group in the United States, have a Patois proverb that goes like this: “Every Day Yu Goad Donkey, One Day Him Gwine Kick Yu.”

The English translation is far less colorful. Translated, it simply means: “Everyone has their limits.”

It is a message the Republican Party would do well to heed if it is to survive beyond November 2016 and be relevant in the rapidly changing socio-demographic landscape that is the United States of America.

In a week when Democrats quickly united ranks around Hillary Clinton as the Party’s Presidential nominee and used a Democratic Party platform forum to gather solutions for comprehensive immigration reform, the Republican Party was continuing to loudly play its beat up on immigrants’ drums.

As the party continued to disintegrate from the belligerent and racist incantations of its Presidential nominee Donald Trump, GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., decided he would join Trump in taking a kick at immigrants as well.

Ryan, who has the power in his hands to actually show his Party is not racist and push forward a measure that can be viewed as even remotely immigrant friendly, instead choose to back his new buddy Trump.

While the Democratic Party platform forum in Washington, D.C. was being urged to address the criminalization of immigrants and end automatic deportation and detention, on the other side of town, House Speaker Ryan was pulling out the terrorism card to scare House Republicans into feeling that there needs to be an “urgent national security strategy that highlights border security while overhauling the nation’s immigration system, interior immigration enforcement, and improved screening of admissions.”

Among other things the Ryan plan calls for is developing the means to track undocumented immigrants within the U.S., detaining and removing criminal immigrants and restoring overall immigration enforcement.

Ryan also took time to slam President Obama for “utterly false claims that security is improving. Like Trump, Ryan insisted that the U.S. “borders are not secure, and the threats along them are growing more dynamic by the day.”

And of course there was more fear mongering as Ryan claimed: “Terrorists have used virtually every major immigration route to enter our country, including citizenship applications, tourist and student visas, and even refugee status.”

Way to go Ryan; you just sealed your Party’s fate! The immigrant voters are lining up and ready to vote and after being egged on for the past eight years, their anger will be unleashed at the ballot box this November.

That’s right Ryan, GOP: The “Donkey” is tired of being goaded and now it’s his turn to “Kick Yu.”

The writer is CMO of Hard Beat Communications, which owns the brands News Americas Now, CaribPR Wire and Invest Caribbean Now.