One Immigrant We Should Have Deported

If you don't know this fantastic story, you should

The Oscar-nominated short films are still showing at the Detroit Film Theatre in the Detroit Institute of Arts. I thought they were especially good this year, and one of the best ones is “Alien,” a terrifying picture of what is about to accelerate in our country.

I always roll my eyes when I hear anti-immigrant Americans say “my ancestors were legal immigrants.” Well, not to Geronimo or Chief Joseph. And back in the day, all it frequently took to be “legal” was passage on a ship and no obvious signs of Glaucoma.

There are, of course, immigrants who should never have been allowed in, one of the worst of whom arrived in 1885, a teenage German named Friedrich, who was dodging the draft. He initially opened a cheap restaurant in Seattle with “a curtained-off area that most likely served as a low-rent whorehouse.” He went on to build a hooker hotel on land he didn’t own, then went to the Yukon and did the same.

Eventually, after getting somewhat rich by selling hard liquor and “sporting ladies” at a bar he called the Arctic, he married a busty blonde his mother couldn’t stand and tried to return to Germany.

But the pre-World War I Germans had some standards. Although he was still technically a German citizen, they investigated, branded him an undesirable alien and ordered him to leave or be deported. He returned to America to resume his ways, but not for very long.

The flu epidemic of 1918 killed him at the age of 49. So he never lived to see his only son Freddie, who was 12 when he died, grow up to become a slumlord sleazeball who was once arrested for participating in a Ku Klux Klan rally in New York.

Nor would Friedrich ever meet the grandson born 28 years after his death, a boy who was named … Donald Trump.

By the way, this is all well-documented; see Pulitzer Prize winning author and investigative reporter Dayid Cay Johnston’s The Making of Donald Trump for more details and original sources.

No, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Or imagine that the grandson of a 1918 flu victim helped cause hundreds of thousands of other Americans to die in the world’s next horrible pandemic. Just gets better and better, doesn’t it?

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