WMAL Interview - Dr. SEBASTIAN GORKA - 08.03.17

INTERVIEW - DR. SEBASTIAN GORKA - Deputy Assistant to President Trump

TOPIC: Trump endorses Senate bill to reform legal immigration into merit-based point system

RAISE IMMIGRATION ACT : President Trump threw his support Wednesday behind a Senate bill that would cut legal immigration in half and implement a new merit-based system that emphasis English-speaking immigrants who can demonstrate job skills. Meeting at the White House with GOP Sens. David Perdue of Georgia and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the bill’s sponsors, the president said the revised legislation “would represent the most significant reform to our immigration system in half a century.” The measure, known as the RAISE Act, “will reduce poverty, increase wages and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars,” Mr. Trump said.

CNN's Acosta, White House aide clash over immigration at briefing. CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta clashed with White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller at the press briefing Wednesday over President Donald Trump's support for legislation that would curb the level of legal immigration to the United States by instituting a skills-based immigration system. Invoking the famous poem inscribed in the base of Statue of Liberty which beckons the world's "tired ... poor ... huddled masses yearning to breathe free" to America's shores, Acosta asked Miller if the White House was "trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country." "It doesn't say anything about speaking English," pressed Acosta. "[A]ren't you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you are telling them they have to speak English?" Miller argued that speaking English is already a requirement for people seeking to become naturalized Americans, and dismissed Acosta's citation of the words on the Statue of Liberty, saying they were a later addition to the statue.