There was a bit of a ruction today in the White House press room, between Trump adviser Stephen Miller and CNN’s Jim Acosta. Acosta was taking the Trump administration to task for proposed immigration restrictions, in particular the frightful idea that an English-speaking nation might give preference to immigrants who can speak English. (Before I go on, let me make clear how refreshing it is to have an administration in place that would even consider such a thing. Establishing an immigration policy that actually puts the interests of the existing American nation first is what Donald Trump was elected for.)

The exchange followed the usual course for such things: leftist accuses someone slightly to his right of being racist, whereupon the man so accused splutters with indignation and vigorously denies the charge.

The climax went as follows:

Acosta: “It sounds like you’re trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country through this policy.” Miller: “Jim, that is one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant , and foolish things you’ve ever said…”

What’s worth noting about this exchange is that both appeared to agree, entirely reflexively, that actually to give a care about the demographic composition of the United States, which was simple common sense until 1965, would now be grossly, even unthinkably, immoral. (It’s worth pointing out that even in 1965, the ruinous Hart-Cellar Act was passed only after lavish promises from Ted Kennedy that it would not affect the nation’s composition to any significant degree.)

What we have here, then, is a “disparate impact” argument: Acosta suggested that favoring English speakers would effectively limit immigration to England and Australia (which would, by implication, be a national catastrophe). Miller was cut to the quick by the hurtfulness of this remark, and provided some crocodile tears for the camera. It was all very trite and tiresome.

Mixed in amongst all of this was what Steve Sailer has called The Zeroth Amendment, namely Emma Lazarus’s mawkish poem “The New Colossus”. Mr. Acosta invoked the poem, as of of course he was bound to do, believing it to foreclose upon all further argument; Mr. Miller tacitly acknowledged its power by mistakenly, and irrelevantly, insisting that it was grafted onto the Statue of Liberty as an afterthought. (It was actually written to help raise money for the statue’s pedestal. It was, however, written by a woman whose deepest allegiance was arguably not to the United States, but to the Jewish diaspora and to Zionism; I rather doubt that she would have invited all the world’s “huddled masses” to her own proposed ethnic homeland.)

Politics in America, 2017. How uplifting it is to be back to watching the news.