There have been many more times than I’d like to count when a politician or someone who holds office says something that literally makes my jaw drop. Yeah, there have been plenty of outlandish and outright wrong things said during these last few years of political turmoil. However, when Florida Senator Marco Rubio told US visitors to return to their own country, I couldn’t believe my ears. There are a lot of terrible things that a politician can say, but I’d argue that being racist is among the worst of them.
In the video, Marco Rubio hosts a press conference directed at those coming into the country as visitors. He explains that people who apply for a visa to go to school are allowed. However, if that person intends to join ‘radical’ movements that participate in ‘vandalism’ and ‘creating a ruckus,’ then that isn’t allowed. In fact, he says that if you disclose that information, you will not be granted the visa, and if you are found to be lying, the visa will be revoked. He punctuates this point by saying,
“If you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it…Go back and do it in your country.”
What’s interesting is that people coming into the country don’t typically do so with the intention of doing anything that he describes. They usually do so with the intention of doing quite literally anything else. However, if their basic rights and humanity are stripped, then, of course, they’re likely to join movements aimed at helping them out.
Despite not using many words, he is directly pointing this aggression at college-aged personnel who are learning things at the universities that they attend in the United States. Because universities tend to be privately owned, professors and on-campus clubs are not required to follow a particular curriculum, and, therefore, those students tend to learn more about the happenings of the country. Rubio does not explicitly describe the laws behind removing a visa under these terms, but I can only expect that students will find ways to circumvent them.
