Ken Cuccinelli said it should read: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”
A day after announcing the Trump administration’s new rule penalizing green-card applicants who use government benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid, acting Director of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli suggested a Trumpian change to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.
Appearing on NPR’s Morning Edition on Tuesday, Cuccinelli defended the policy shift, insisting that it was actually a long-standing position by the country to insist that immigrants seeking to settle in America are not a burden on the state.
Arguing that it “doesn’t seem like too much to ask” that “self-sufficiency is central to the American value set,” the former Virginia attorney general went on to say that if any legal immigrants “don’t have future prospects” without welfare, “that will be counted against them.”
View the complete August 13 article by Justin Baragona on the Daily Beast website here.