WAIT, I THOUGHT THAT POEM WAS PART OF THE CONSTITUTION OR SOMETHING: White House aide: Statue of liberty poem not the test for immigration policy.
Top White House policy aide Stephen Miller on Wednesday defended the White House’s new legal immigration legislation in part by saying the famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty was added years after the statue’s unveiling.
The poem includes the lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Miller was responding to a CNN reporter quoting lines from the famous poem during a White House press briefing where Miller was discussing the White House’s newly proposed immigration proposal that gives preference to English-speakers. . . .
“I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty lighting the world, it’s a symbol of liberty lighting the world. The poem you are referring to, which was added later, is not part of the original Statue of Liberty,” Miller said.
Miller then peppered Acosta with historic immigration numbers, asking him what level of immigration would satisfy “Jim Acosta’s definition of the Statue of Liberty poem’s law of the land.”
Poet Emma Lazarus wrote the famous poem,”The New Colossus,” to celebrate the statue’s 1883 unveiling. Eighteen years later, the poem was inscribed on the statue’s pedestal, where it remains as a key fixture of the monument.
Besides, if we don’t base our immigration policy on a 19th Century poem, what possible guidance is there?
And then there’s this: After battle with Jim Acosta, Stephen Miller gets called a Nazi, white supremacist, and Hannibal Lecter.
Remember, these are supposed to be the sane, sensible people who get nuance. Not like those crazy, irrational Trumpies who will lash out at anything.
To be a lefty is to believe that the Constitution is a living document that changes with the times, but a poem on a statue binds immigration policy forever.