Dumbing Down

   "I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door." -- Emma Lazarus, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

   The inanity of GOP candidate proposals is plumbing new depths of idiocy.
   First there was the Great Wall of Mexico, which would stretch 2,000 miles along the southern borders of four states. Now, Scott Walker has praised as "legitimate" an idea to erect a 5,000 mile wall along the northern border of the U.S. to keep out undesirables from Canada.
   Also, Chris Christie has urged that newcomers and visitors to the U.S. be tracked daily, just as FedEx tracks packages. Perhaps Christie will agree to a microchip under his own skin when he visits Canada.
   Question: How dumb do they think voters are? If the politicians think voters are as intelligent as the candidates, that speaks poorly of the candidates.
   Here's a very short list of Canadians who have contributed greatly in the U.S.: John Kenneth Galbraith, economist and advisor to Presidents; David Brooks, newspaper columnist; Morley Safer, Peter Jennings, and Ashleigh Banfield, TV journalists; Michael J. Fox, Pamela Anderson, Paul Anka, Dan Aykroyd, and Jim Carey, entertainers.
   Other prominent newcomers to America would include Henry Kissinger (Germany), Madeleine Albright (Czechoslovakia), Wolf Blitzer (Germany), Arianna Huffington (Greece), George Soros (Hungary), and Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, who was born in Moscow.
   Even Donald Trump's grandfather, who immigrated to the U.S. from Germany in 1885. And presidential candidate Bobby Jindal, whose parents came from India.
   So to wall off America and close the Golden Door of opportunity is to deprive the nation of a great reservoir of talent.