Critics School Stephen Miller For Building Up These Absurd American History Claims
Donald Trump’s senior White House aide Stephen Miller pushed a bonkers, racist claim on Monday after he suggested that he could spot someone’s immigration status just by looking at a picture of them.
Miller, in a Fox News appearance, reacted to an ABC News clip of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) emphasizing that LA is a “city of immigrants” and it won’t get rebuilt “without immigrant labor” after devastating wildfires earlier this year.
“If you look at photos of the Empire State Building being constructed — in record time, by the way — you know what you don’t see there? Any illegal aliens,” Miller told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
“You look at the photos of us landing a man on the moon, you look at the NASA control room, you don’t see any photos of illegal aliens. Americans built this country, Americans sustained this country, Americans have powered this country for two and a half centuries.”
In reality, immigrants played a key role in the construction of the Empire State Building, a project that — at its peak — had a workforce of 3,500 people.
Many of the workers were Irish and Italian immigrants, who were notably joined by Mohawk ironworkers, according to the Museum of the City of New York.
The iconic skyscraper was also designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon: a firm founded by Canadian-born architect Richmond Shreve and William F. Lamb, whose father was an immigrant from Scotland, before Chicago native Arthur Loomis Harmon joined in 1929.
The Empire State Building took just over 13 months to build between March 1930 and April 1931, becoming the world’s tallest building at the time. It held that title for nearly four decades until the construction of the World Trade Center.
Social media users ripped Miller’s skyscraper talk and also took aim at his NASA comments, referring to the secret U.S. intelligence program ‘Operation Paperclip’ that brought Nazi scientists to America that played be a key part in the beginnings of NASA and its Apollo missions in the years after World War II.
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