Explosive comments about the Statue of Liberty made by White House adviser Stephen Miller reveal an "ignorance" so profound he should be ineligible to be an American citizen, says the head of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, a prominent civil- and human-rights nonprofit.
"Stephen Miller has turned himself simultaneously into a statue of arrogance and a national monument of ignorance," the center's executive director Steven Goldstein said in a statement.
At a press briefing on Wednesday, Miller described President Donald Trump's support of dramatically curbing legal immigration and requiring proficiency in English and work skills from those entering the U.S., when he was told by CNN's Jim Acosta that the proposal "does not sound like it's keeping with American tradition."
Acosta read from the Emma Lazarus poem on the statue which stands on a small island in New York Harbor — "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'' — and told Miller "it doesn't say anything about speaking English or being . . . a computer programmer."
Miller shot back: "The Statue of Liberty . . . is a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you are referring to was added later and is not part of the original Statue of Liberty."
He then asked the CNN reporter how many legal immigrants per year would satisfy "Jim Acosta's definition of the Statue of Liberty poem law of the land?"
In his statement, which the Anne Frank Center posted on Twitter, Goldstein added that Miller's "subpar knowledge of American history, as reflected in Emma Lazarus' poem, means he couldn't pass President Trump's new immigration test. Therefore, Stephen, please leave."
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