This week, the latest in a series of themed “weeks” that are reportedly a running joke within the West Wing, is “American Dream Week.” (Last week, which saw the shock firing of Reince Priebus, followed shortly thereafter by the shock firing of Anthony Scaramucci, was “American Heroes Week.”) And what better way to celebrate the American Dream than to endorse a bill that sharply curtails legal immigration?

A lifetime ago, in early May, Donald Trump sat down for an interview with The Economist in which he was asked, specifically, about legal immigration, and whether he wanted to cut the number of legal immigrants. “Oh legal, no, no, no. I want people to come into the country legally,” he responded. “No, legally? No. I want people to come in legally.” The interviewer, perhaps incredulous, asked the question again: “But the numbers of those people could be as high as the numbers that are coming in legally now? You’re not looking to reduce the numbers?” The president was adamant: “Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, we want people coming in legally.”

On Wednesday, at an event in the White House, Trump stood at a lectern, flanked by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, and announced his support for the RAISE Act, which would slash legal immigration by 50 percent within the next 10 years, claiming that the U.S. has allowed far too many low-skilled immigrants to enter the country and that the days of welcoming these slackers to our shores are numbered. Under the RAISE Act, people wanting to live in the U.S. would be judged on their level of education, their skills, and, in a bit of red meat for the MAGA crowd, their ability to speak English. “This competitive application process will favor applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families, and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy,” Trump said. The legislation, he added, “will reduce poverty, increase wages, and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars.”

Many experts (and a good number of members of Trump’s own party) disagree. As Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whose state’s No. 1 industry is agriculture, warned, “If this proposal were to become law, it would be devastating to our state’s economy.” The results of a Washington Post poll from July showed that 89 percent of economists surveyed think curbing immigration is a bad idea, predicting that it will slow growth at the same time that “MAGAnomics” is supposed to be driving growth of at least 3 percent a year. “Restricting immigration will only condemn us to chronically low rates of economic growth,” economist Bernard Baumohl said. “It also increases the risk of the recession.” In April, over 1,400 economists sent a letter to Trump and congressional leaders informing them that “immigration is one of America’s significant competitive advantages in the global economy.” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who worked under George H.W. Bush and was one of the signatories, said at the time, “Immigration is not just a good thing. It’s a necessity.”

The Trump administration has never been accused of hewing too closely to facts. Still, you’d think the White House would be better prepared than senior policy adviser Stephen Miller was during a subsequent press briefing Wednesday, when he was pressed by a New York Times reporter to provide statistics proving that low-skilled workers are hurting the economy. Instead, Miller, who has a long, rageful history of opposing immigration and immigrants, went with this:

Granted, it’s difficult in the current political environment to unequivocally oppose immigration without being accused of being a bigot. But Miller did himself no favors when CNN’s Jim Acosta deigned to school him on the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, particularly the famous Emma Lazarus poem engraved at her base. “Well, first of all,” Miller shot back, “right now, it’s a requirement that to be naturalized, you have to speak English. So the notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of the immigration systems would be actually very ahistorical. Secondly, I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty enlightening the world . . . The poem that you’re referring to was added later, it’s not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.” Miller’s painful pedantry and faux outrage only got worse from there, accusing Acosta, in response to the accusation that the administration is “trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country,” of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias.”