During a segment on ABC’s The View this Monday, the hosts discussed comments from pro-Turmp bomb-thrower Tomi Lahren, who recently appeared on Fox News to slam illegal immigrants for having “low skills,” among other things.
During an appearance on Fox’s Watters’ World this weekend, Lahren defended comments from White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who recently made headlines for saying immigrants who come to the U.S. illegally “don’t integrate well” and “don’t have skills.”
Lahren doubled down on Kelly’s comments, saying that accepting people into the U.S. with “low skills and low education” and who don’t speak English is “not what this country is based on.”
“We don’t believe in importing poverty,” Lahren said. “Trust me, I live in California. We have enough poverty, we have enough issues — we don’t need anymore.”
Lahren’s comments sparked a huge backlash on social media.
At the outset of the segment, host Whoopi Goldberg wondered when the view of immigrants went from people “trying to find their American dream” to “isolated freeloaders.”
“People have always come from other countries,” Goldberg said. “They were fleeing pogroms, they were fleeing horrible things. But many of them are well educated and well versed in many things, but not necessarily in English, and when they got here, they became peddlers, or they became people that opened small stores.”
“The idea [immigrants] don’t know anything, and they are bringing us down, is crap,” she continued. “We all come from immigrants, including you, Tomi Lahren — you come from immigrants as well. I don’t know your family, and I don’t know Mr. Kelly’s family, and I can tell you, folks came, and no, they didn’t necessarily speak English. They came and they learned, and maybe you don’t have a grandma twice, a great-grandma to remember.”
That’s when co-host Joy Behar chimed in.
“She talks about low skills — what exactly are her skills?” Behar said to applause from the audience. “Does anybody know?”
According to co-host Sara Haines, Lahren is contradicting herself.
“Two things that jump out at me is there is a contradiction of argument,” Haines said. “Either they are stealing American jobs or they are uneducated. You can’t have both arguments.”
Watch the video below:
Featured image via screen grab
