The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Words appropriate for today, the 124th Anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, by President Grover Cleveland, and the 74th of the rededication on the 50th Anniversary by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In light of the rhetoric of this election, I felt a meditation was in order.
Perhaps I should have titled this piece differently, more along the lines of "is the Statue of Liberty now obsolete?" After all, the poem by Lazarus bespeaks a meaning that too many in this country now reject.
Perhaps also we should have seen this coming, in the rhetoric of Patrick Buchanan when he used to opine about how the nature and culture of America was being changed - because the immigrants coming in were not white Europeans?
Perhaps I am sensitive to this because of family, immediate and extended.
My father's father came in past the Statue of Liberty, an immigrant Jew from Poland who sailed from Germany. David Bernstein was still alive while I was an infant.
My mother's father's father and his parents came from Lithuania, in the 1860's, before there was a Statue, or an Ellis Island.
My mother's mother and her family came in the first decade of the 20th Century, also being welcomed by the Lady in the Harbor, the New Colossus who honored those coming, who welcomed their contributions to our society.
But my extended family includes the husband of one of my wife's sisters, whose Hispanic surnamed ancestors were in what is now this country before any of the ancestors of most the Tea Party types. Tom Tancredo and his family probably arrived well over a century later. We annexed their nation.
Or our niece, daughter of one of my wife's other sisters, whose father is a retired Marine Officer whose family has been in what is now this country for more than 1,000 years - he is Native American.
I know too much history to believe that this nation has always been welcoming of newcomers. We have had our fits of xenophobia in the past. There were signs in Boston, whose politics we so often associate with the Irish, that equated Hibernians with canines in rejecting their applications for employment.
Our restricting immigration after the Great War with the National Origins Act was a previous attempt to try to define the nature of this nation as White, Northern European, and largely Protestant - but by then there were too many Irish and Italian Catholics, too many Eastern Europeans of a variety of religions - Polish Catholics, Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox, Jews - for that ever to be successful.
I believe our culture, our society continue to be enriched by those who are newcomers.
Yes, some are here illegally. But somehow we only complain about those who come from our South - be they Hispanic and darker skinned, or Black with Caribbean accents - or from our West as in East and South Asia - still, they look and sound "different" and for that reason some fear them.
Somehow we do not seem so paranoid about Russians, even if mobsters, who arrive on tourist visas and disappear into various Russian ethnic enclaves. We do not comb the neighborhoods of New York and Boston with many of Irish origin who are not documented.
The greatness of this nation has been our ability to accept people from a variety of backgrounds, learn from them even as they learn from us.
We forget how much we benefited even in our earlier years from people who migrated here.
In both our Revolution and our Civil War we had people come to this country to fight on our behalf.
In wars since we have had people who could have been classified as "undocumented aliens" or "anchor babies" who have sacrificed nobly on behalf of the entire nation.
We have had people of groups that were despised at the time fight heroically on our behalf - think for example of Sen. Daniel Inouye, a very belated winner of his well-deserved Medal of Honor.
Imagine the Manhattan Project without these names: Fermi, Szilard, Teller, Feynmann, Oppenheimer, Alvarez, Einstein, Kistiakowsky, Perlman, Rabi, Schwinger - all members of ethnic groups discriminated against at one point or another, some of more than one.
Our arts are full of people from groups that have experienced discrimination.
Our food has been enriched by every culture that has arrived.
Our language is richer.
Our nation is richer because of the diversity.
We did not insist upon those arriving being wealth. Consider the words of the poem, that so many of my generation learned to sing, in a setting by Irving Berlin,or should I use his birth name, Israel Baline, born in Russia?
Listen:
I have shared my wrestling about continuing to teach, since I teach government, if I cannot teach it honestly.
Now I wonder how I will feel about being an American if we have governors of the ilk of Tom Tancredo in a state in which Hispanics were living before his first ancestor set foot in the New World? How will I feel if the hostile rhetoric directed at a President with a funny name and a dark skin broadens to exclude even more of us?
I also wonder about those who engage in inflammatory rhetoric who benefit from the low-cost labor of those they rail against? After all, it is not usually the middle class and the working class that is using nannies whose papers might not be in order, that needs a lawn service for the many acres of the mansion whose crews are often comprised of day laborers picked up at a local gathering site.
We have seen the impact of this rhetoric not far from where I type these words, in Arlington VA. I am less than half an hour from Prince William County, which began to rhetorically attack Hispanics a few years back, an action whose only real positive benefit came from the wonderful film 9500 Liberty by my friends Eric Byler and Annabel Park, which has rightly won awards and been praised by the likes of Roger Ebert.
I do not know how many of my students are undocumented, or perhaps would be classified as "anchor babies." I do welcome the incredible diversity before me - I see it in their faces. I hear it in their names. I encounter it in how some dress - young ladies from seriously Muslim families studying even more seriously American Government and Politics.
There are some who would, 145 years after the 13th Amendment, treat some as lesser merely because of the color of their skin. There are those who are somehow so fearful that they wish to exclude those of a different faith. And for the life of me I cannot fathom how the shared and committed love of people I know have for one another is a threat to the marriage of others who claim to be threatened by two people of the same external genitalia wanting to marry one another because of their love and commitment.
Surely we are more than our genitalia.
Surely we are more than our skin color, the shape of our eyes, the bone structure of our faces and our bodies.
Surely the way a person chooses to acknowledge something greater than themselves or instead to focus on her fellow humans rather than turn to some external sense of divine can only threaten those whose own sense of faith or place in the world is unsure, insecure.
I fear for my country. I am ready to weep for my country.
I am not yet ready to give up on my country, notwithstanding the electoral results this forthcoming Tuesday.
I wonder what symbol of America is most honored overseas? Somehow I remember the Lady of Liberty in Tiananmen Square a while back, an hommage to the Lady whose dedication we should be commemorating to day.
Give me tired, your poor . . . . let us refresh them, welcome them, give them the opportunity to escape poverty, which is why so many still risk the dangers of our Southern border
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . imagine that, that still so many people in so many nations yearn for the idea of freedom this nation represents, despite our dishonoring it in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, by "extraordinary renditions" and by doing legal gymnastics to try to exclude people from the Constitutional protections established to preserve our freedom
the wretched refuse of your teeming shores . . . or of your overcrowded cities, your devastated and impoverished countrysides
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me . . . if they do not have a home where they are, should we not be willing to offer them a home here, to shelter them from the tempests, to enable them to flourish??
I think we have a responsibility to change the last line, not to speak as individuals, but as a collective:
We lift our lamp beside the golden door!
When we cease to welcome, we will cease to be what America is supposed to be.
Peace.