Using Lady Liberty as a Trojan Horse

It wasn’t that long ago that racism carried decisive political cost for Republicans. Back in 2012, Ken Cuccinelli, then the attorney general of Virginia, did an interview with a conservative show called The Morning Majority and spoke of immigrants in a manner many considered to be a comparison to vermin. “It is worse than our immigration policy,” he said of Washington, D.C.’s pest control standards. “You can’t break up rat families. Or raccoons, and all the rest, and you can’t even kill ‘em.”

The comparison more or less doomed Cuccinelli’s 2013 bid for Virginia governor. Six short years and one trip to the twilight zone later, this man is running the entire nation’s naturalization and immigration system. He clearly feels now that he has a bit more leeway to be himself.

On Tuesday, the acting director of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services took to the airwaves to discuss a new Trump administration rule that proposes to drastically change green card criteria, The rule would institutE a “wealth test” for those legal immigrants entering the country on temporary visas to determine which are likely to need nutrition assistance, subsidized housing, or various other government benefits should they qualify for permanent residency. “If they don’t have future prospects of being legal permanent residents without welfare, that will be counted against them,” Cuccinelli told NPR’s Morning Edition on Tuesday morning, adding the administration would welcome “all immigrants who can stand on their own two feet, self-sufficient, pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

Cuccinell’s interview might have gone unnoticed had he not decided to mutilate the famous Emma Lazarus poem that sits at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

“Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” Cuccinnelli said on NPR, twisting “The New Colossus” into Trumpist talking points. Later on CNN, he added this bit of ahistorical bigotry when asked what he thinks America stands for: “Well, of course that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe where they had class-based societies.” Tempted as I was to mail Cuccinelli a book on African caste systems, I chose not to waste the postage.

The colorful Cuccinelli statements made the most noise, naturally. Folks even stopped talking about the rule itself, which is already being challenged in court. This change in policy threatens to not only cut legal immigration but also to make American citizenship, as a franchise, seem exclusive only to those immigrants who are rich enough to meet the standards of someone as ostentatious as Donald Trump.

However, the real con behind this is that Trump would have us believe that he is trying to guard the very same social safety net that his party has been trying to erode for decades. Reading the rule, it appears his administration grasps a fundamental reality about government programs: they are popular when they benefit the people whom you like.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/public-charge-rule-ken-cuccinelli-racist-871801/