In Ben Carson's Mind, African Slaves Were Immigrants

Ben Carson, the new secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration, may need to bone up on American history, especially that part dealing with slavery.

Carson told a roomful of federal employees, presumably all of them employed at HUD, that "There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they, too, had a dream that one day their" descendants "might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."

A Washington Post report, published in the daily free paper amNew York (March 7, 2017) noted that his comments provoked "an uproar on social media."

It seems that Carson is unaware that an immigrant is someone who chooses to leave one country to settle somewhere else.The African slaves who were brought to America didn't have that option. Therefore they were not immigrants.