MSNBC's Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough said that President Donald Trump's perspective on immigration is so wretched that German-born genius Albert Einstein "may have ended up in a Nazi concentration camp" had their time periods overlapped.
Scarborough made his bold statement Friday in light of Fox News host Laura Ingraham's controversial comment earlier this week that "the America that we know and love doesn't exist anymore" as a result of "massive demographic changes."
"All of this talk, from Laura Ingraham to Corey Stewart," Scarborough said, referring to a GOP Senate nominee linked to white nationalists, "Overlooks one small detail of American history, that many Americans said the same ignorant thing hundreds of years ago."
"And 150 years ago, when the Irish came. They said the same ignorant things when the Germans came. They said the same ignorant things when the Italians came to America," Scarborough continued. "There have been a small segment of know-nothings who have been saying ignorant things about immigrants coming to this country for over 240 years."
Scarborough used Silicon Valley success stories as examples of immigrants who made significant contributions to the U.S. If Trump had Stewart's viewpoint of the U.S., he said, "then you wouldn't have had Steve Jobs over here, you wouldn't have had the founder of Google over here, the founder of Yahoo over here, the founder of Reddit over here, the founder of eBay over here."
"And if we want to go back a few years, even Albert Einstein may have ended up in a Nazi concentration camp with Donald Trump's viewpoint on immigration," Scarborough concluded.
Trump’s decision to slur Hispanics as “breeders”, “rapists” and gang-members (less than 1% of immigrants) has set this cause back and will undercut conservatism for a generation unless candidates proactively condemn the not-so-soft bigotry of Trump and talk show hosts.
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 10, 2018
It was not the first time Scarborough has linked Trump's immigration stance to that of Nazis.
The MSNBC host likened federal immigration officials who carried out a Trump administration policy that led to migrant families being separated at the border, to Nazis.
"I know children are being marched away to showers, marched away to showers, being told they are—just like the Nazis said that they were taking people to the showers and then they never came back," Scarborough said in June.
The White House slammed Scarborough for his comment.
"It is appalling that Joe Scarborough would compare sworn federal law enforcement officers—who put their lives on the line every day to keep American people safe—to Nazis," White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement.
"While Scarborough is quick to launch into his straight-to-camera outrage over the temporary separation of illegal alien families," Gidley continued, "He has never shown similar outrage for the permanent separation of American families forever torn apart from their children, who were killed by criminal aliens as a result of Democrats' open borders policies."
There is no evidence that immigrants commit more crime than other Americans.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
A Los Angeles native, Jessica Kwong grew up speaking Spanish, Cantonese and English, in that order. Her journalism career started ... Read more
