Michael Savage, himself the son of an immigrant, stated on the Michael Savage Show Wednesday, “We’re no longer living in the age of the Statue of Liberty, where we can take in all of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. No, my friends, those days are over.”

Michael Savage addressed President Donald Trump’s proposed merit-based immigration reforms during his Michael Savage Show monologue on Wednesday. Savage is strongly in favor of Trump’s plan, based on Savage’s belief that, “we’re no longer living in the age of the Statue of Liberty, where we can take in all of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Savage referenced the Statue of Liberty following the contentious exchange between CNN’s Jim Acosta and Trump Senior Advisor Stephen Miller, in which Miller chastised Acosta’s “cosmopolitan bias” on the topic of immigration. Savage knows that many feel American is a “nation of immigrants” and say to themselves, “we’ve always accepted the poor, the masses, the wretched refuse.”

What he sees as the critical difference between 1883 — when the State of Liberty’s poem was written — and today, is the introduction of the welfare state. His point is that the immigrants of past ages did not have a welfare safety net. Savage added with his trademark fire, “They were not coming here to sit on their fat behinds and drink a beer, or whatever they do.” Savage explained the lifestyle of immigrants in the past, including those in his own family:

They worked their behinds off in factories. That’s why they lived 16 to a room. There was nothing waiting for them. They did it grimly, hoping that their child or children would do better than they did. That was the American way, they did not expect to go to the front of the line and push the native-born out of the way.

Savage makes it clear that he doesn’t hate immigrants from any nation. What he is deeply opposed to is immigrants coming to America and claiming benefits, which he says has left the health-care system “broken.” He added that an increasing number of immigrants to this country do not integrate with our culture. Using the Somali population in Minnesota as an example, Savage said, “If the process continues, the culture and tradition of the local population will disappear.”

Michael Savage ended his monologue with a final warning, “It seems awfully coincidental that the new populations would be less likely to resist the borderless, globalist new world order where internationalist hoards and boards of unelected bureaucrats regulate the political and economic lives of everyone on the planet.”

Colin Madine is a contributor and editor at Breitbart News and can be reached at cmadine@breitbart.com