The president of an organization dedicated to getting millennials to the polls frustrated MSNBC host Joy Reid Saturday morning when he compared undocumented immigrant "Dreamers" to welfare recipients, leading her to cut him off and explain the obvious differences to him with employment numbers.
Attempting to make the point that he has concerns about the process that allows the Dreamers to remain in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy Chris Prudhome, president of Vote America Now, brought up welfare.
"I choose my words very carefully when I say this," Prudhome began. "And I really want to be -- I don't want to rip my words apart, but the reality is this. Let's take the welfare for an example -- not that I'm comparing the two -- but f we encourage in certain aspects of the system we encourage people to continue to stay on the program without any type of concrete assurance moving forward."
"Wait, wait, wait, hold on a second," a stunned Reid replied. "I'm sorry, but you brought up the welfare system as a -- Okay, that is not related to DACA. I already went through and I said 91.5 percent of these young people are employed, those who are not are students or children. And one of the things that changed is once DACA happened they could actually become employed."
"Right," Prudhome countered. "That's phenomenal. But at the same time one in four Americans is not employed, so why not encourage them to become citizens of America?"
Asked if he wanted to see "blanket citizenship for the DACA recipients," Prudmone hedged, saying, "I mean, if they meet the requirements and it's safe for America and makes sense overall, of course we want them to be citizens. That's just the reality of what it is."
Watch the video below via MSNBC:
