Illegal immigrants can hurt US economy, professor argues, prompting calls for his firing | Fox News
A college professor in Georgia is drawing criticism for his online comments about illegal immigrants, including his contention that people in the U.S. illegally can be a drain on the nation’s economy.
“If you are going to reward illegal immigrants, there will be more illegal immigrants,” Fang Zhou, an associate professor of history at Georgia Gwinnett College near Atlanta, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“If you are going to reward illegal immigrants, there will be more illegal immigrants.”
— Fang Zhou, associate professor of history, Georgia Gwinnett College
Fang Zhou (Georgia Gwinnett College)
Zhou says he welcomes the criticism, including from those who say he should lose his job, according to the report.
“I am against political correctness,” Zhou, a legal immigrant from China, told the newspaper. “I speak truth to power in class and my students learn about the financial drain of illegal immigration on the economy and the high crime rates of illegal immigrants.
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“My students are ‘woke’ and are overwhelmingly against illegal immigration after taking my class,” he added.
But Zhou told the paper he does not force students to share his opinions.
His critics, however, argue that many of Zhou’s assertions have been debunked and they object to some of the terms he uses in his comments, such as “libtards,” and “ghetto thugs.”
One such critic, according to the report, is Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese-American elected to the state’s House of Representatives.
Nguyen posted some of Zhou’s comments on Twitter this week and asked her followers: “Are these the values supported by Georgia Gwinnett College?”
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“I have concerns about him teaching those things in a classroom,” Nguyen, a Democrat, told the Journal-Constitution. She noted that nearly 70 percent of the college’s students are either African-American, Asian or Hispanic, and planned to write to college officials to formally complain about Zhou.
“I have concerns about him teaching those things in a classroom.”
— Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen
Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen, Democrat.
College officials did not respond directly to the newspaper’s request for comment but shared the school’s “academic freedom policy,” which stipulates that faculty members are allowed to express their views “without fear of censure.”
The same policy, however, told faculty members that they “should remember that the public may judge” their profession and the college by what they say and write.