Jim Acosta, racist apologist for white privilege

There are about 1.2 billion English speakers in the world, including 125 million Indians, 90 million Filipinos, 79 million Nigerians, 30 million Bengalis, 28 million Egyptians and 15 million Pakistanis, according to Wikipedia. More than half of all English-speakers are non-European. Barely a tenth of English speakers outside the United States live in Britain, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Acosta’s gaffe was epically ignorant and racist in the extreme.

Acosta repeatedly interrupted Miller, chanting “Give me your tired, your poor…,” a line from Emma Lazarus’ 1883 sonnet The New Colossus which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. If anything, Miller handled the CNN journalist too gently. He might have said: America had no restrictions to immigration in 1883, and millions of white European immigrants poured into the American heartland. To accommodate them we drove out the Native Americans. By 1890 there were only 250,000 Native Americans left in the United States, compared to 2 million or more before European settlers arrived. In other words, we gave privileges to white people and killed or displaced people of color. You can argue the merits of this policy, but we don’t want to return to a situation in which immigration occurs at the expense of people who were here first.”