She probly mixed the illegals up with the slave immigration of the city's past; all that money changing hands and all.
I'm still thinking slavers, though.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/07/31/opium-boston-history
How about that? It was both. Opium and slaves. Traded by the Boston elite...
Jonathan Goldstein, a research associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, says Boston merchants defended the trade, "even though they knew it was a debilitating drug that ruined lives." Their thinking, says Goldstein, was that opium was no worse than alcohol and better than other forms of trade, namely: slaves.
Opium was seen as "mild by comparison," Goldstein says.
The Perkins family indeed traded slaves from a base in Haiti in the late 1700s. Business shifted to China and opium in the early 1800s and later some members of the next generation condemned slavery. By the mid-1800s, Murray Forbes had become an active abolitionist. But on the business side, there are strong connections between the slavery and opium trades.
"The kind of expertise they [Perkins and Co.] bring to [opium] in terms of managing goods and finances is something that starts in the slave trade," says Dael Norwood, an assistant professor of history at Binghamton University who studies 19th-century U.S.-China trade.
And money earned selling slaves helped fund the China trade.
"It's the capital that ties it all together," Norwood says.
Yessirree, Bob. It's the capital that ties it all together.