… In an interview on NPR, the administration’s immigration chief, Ken Cuccinelli, offered a reworking of the 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.”
It’s this sort of rhetoric that’s driving the administration’s policies and Republican attitudes toward immigration — and is mirrored by conservative media. …
When Pew asked in August 2016 — months into Trump’s political rhetoric — Republicans were 37 percentage points more likely to say that immigrants were hard-working than not and 10 points more likely to say they weren’t more prone to committing crime.
Now? Republicans are 12 percentage points more likely to say that immigrants are hard-working, a 25-point swing. Republicans are now more likely to say that immigrants commit crime at higher rates than citizens than to say that they don’t. …
We’ve spent more than a week debating the extent to which Trump’s rhetoric influenced the El Paso shooter. There’s little question, though, that his rhetoric has shifted how Republicans broadly view immigrants to the United States leading to an administration official literally suggesting that the wording on the Statue of Liberty was too generous to those seeking to come to the United States. CONT.
Philip Bump, Washington Post