Michael Savage said on Wednesday the U.S. no longer lives in the "age of the Statue of Liberty" as he praised President Donald Trump for his latest proposal to curb immigration to the country.
Trump appeared with Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue to rollout a modification of a bill first introduced in February that would cut legal immigration levels in half over the next decade along with making it more "merit-based" with an emphasis on job skills rather than family ties, The Washington Post reported.
The conservative talk radio host said America has changed since Emma Lazarus' 1883 poem attached to the Statue of Liberty that says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free."
"Yes, my friends, we're no longer living in the age of the Statue of Liberty, where we can take in all of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free," Savage said, per World News Daily. "No, my friends, those days are over.”
"… No, no, they worked their behinds off in factories. That's why they lived 16 to a room. There was nothing waiting for them. They did it grimly, hoping that their child or children would do better than they did. That was the American way. They did not expect to go to the front of the line and push the native-born out of the way."
White House senior advisor Stephen Miller got into a heated exchange Wednesday with CNN reporter Jim Acosta about Trump's immigration proposal during which the Statue of Liberty poem was brought up, Deadline.com noted.
Miller pushed back after Acosta suggested that the portion of the proposal that stated that new immigrants must know English meant that new entries could be limited to Britain and Australia.
"This is an amazing moment," Miller said in the exchange, per Deadline.com. "That you would think only people from Great Britain and Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hardworking immigrants who do speak English from all over the world."
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