Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting head of
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, reinforced his controversial
interpretation of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty ― this time giving
it a racist twist.
CNN
journalist Erin
Burnett was asking Cuccinelli about his earlier interview
with NPR, in which he reworded the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” saying: “Give me your tired and your
poor who
can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public
charge.”
“‘Wretched,’ ‘poor,’
refuse’ - right? That’s what the poem says America is supposed to stand for. So
what do you think America stands for?” Burnett asked Cuccinelli.
“Well, of course, that poem was referring back to people
coming from Europe,” Cucinelli answered, “where they had class-based societies,
where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class ...
And it was written one year after the first federal public charge rule was
written.”
It is unclear why Cucinelli felt the need to specify the
group of immigrants Lazarus was referring to. The poem itself describes the
Statue of Liberty by saying, “From her beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide
welcome.” USCIS did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for
comment.
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