Jim Acosta is CNN's Chief White House Correspondent and author of The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America.From his interview with The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner:
When you quote the Emma Lazarus poem to Stephen Miller, are you hoping to change his mind? To reach viewers? What is going through your mind?--Marshal Zeringue
My thinking at that moment is that everyone is watching this live, and they are seeing someone standing at the podium saying they are not just going to change the nation’s immigration system but the prevailing sense of what immigrants have been to America for generations. And I thought, at that moment, what Stephen was talking about was essentially a policy that flies in the face of America’s tradition of welcoming immigrants into this country, a tradition that says not all immigrants have to come into this country speaking fluent English and having a Ph.D. There are folks, like my dad, who came into this country at eleven years old, couldn’t speak English, couldn’t write English, but was pulled aside in class and taught how to do that and worked as a blue-collar guy in grocery stores for forty years, but paid into Social Security, paid into Medicare, and helped raise two kids who are doing quite well.
That, also, is part of our immigrant experience. And what I thought was happening that day with Stephen Miller was that he was again trying to tell the American people that up was down and black was white. Telling people that the Statue of Liberty doesn’t apply to immigration, to me, was a huge moment, because it said to me that they are not really willing to deal with reality when it comes to advancing their interests and their agenda. And that has to be...[read on]