Reducing America’s intake of “refugees” is “both immoral and cruel,” said The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe during a Sunday-aired segment on CNN’s GPS.
Neither GPS host Fareed Zakaria nor Ioffe’s fellow guest panelists — Gideon Rose and Dan Senor — challenged Ioffe’s moral assessment of Trump’s proposals to restrict refugee admissions. Not a word was said of Islamic terrorism and its overlap with Muslims; also unmentioned were today’s primary sources of ostensible refugees: failed Muslim-majority states such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Muslims compose the majority of contemporarily labeled refugees; a fact unmentioned by Zakaria or his GPS guests. Alternative resettlement options for Muslim refugees within the Middle East or North Africa were also ignored by Zakaria and his guests.
Ioffe suggested that “racism” was motivating the Trump administration’s proposed changes to immigration and refugee admission policies, describing the policies as “demographic engineering.”
Melania Trump is “the right kind of immigrant” in the eyes of Trump’s supporters, said Ioffe, describing the first lady as a “beautiful white woman from Europe.” Zakaria grinned in agreement with Ioffe’s assessment (he regularly frames those who voted for Donald Trump as angry and poorly educated white racists.)
“English is a pretty easy language to learn,” claimed Ioffe in criticizing proposals to mandate English language proficiency for prospective immigrants. “I think most people could pick it up in a few months.”
Watch the segment below:
Ioffe regularly advances narratives hyping “Russian interference” within American politics, framing Donald Trump as either beholden to, compromised by, or conspiring with forces of political subversion directed by the Kremlin.
Zakaria and Ioffe both present themselves as politically objective and non-partisan news media figures. Both CNN and The Atlantic similarly present themselves as politically objective and non-partisan news media outlets; the former billing itself as “The Most Trusted Name In News.”
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