Stuart K. Hayashi
In the United States, MAGA nationalists have gotten sick of hearing the fact that the Statue of Liberty
🗽 delivers a clear invitation to immigrants. These MAGA nationalists are immediately reminded of Emma Lazarus’s poem at the statue’s base where it welcomes the world’s tired and poor huddled masses. These MAGA nationalists recite their stock reply that the poem was only added seventeen years subsequent to the statue’s opening ceremony. They then proclaim that this means that the Statue of Liberty did not originally represent the freedom of immigration.
Donald Trump’s presidential advisor Stephen Miller, who is in charge of ICE’s cruel infractions, is among those who provide this revisionist history about the Statue. In 2017, he
sniveled, “...the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to was added later [and] is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
That same year, the same opinion came from the late Rush Limbaugh. On the radio, Limbaugh
pontificated,
...the Statue of Liberty and the Emma Lazarus poem is a great illustration of how immigration policy and the United States/Statue of Liberty has become bastardized. “Give us your tired, your poor” and so forth literally has nothing to do with the purpose of the United States.
In fact, it’s never been on the Statue. It is inside the pedestal. It was only put there when they put a museum in there. It was not part of the original Statue of Liberty. It was not part of the design. The statue was a gift to the United States from the people of France as a beacon of freedom and liberty. It’s a testament to our Founding and our Founding Fathers, and this Emma Lazarus poem had nothing to do with it. It had nothing whatsoever to do with it!
The poem was put in the pedestal museum because it was used as part of the fundraising for the pedestal. It’s been co-opted by immigration activists and leftists to actually [split infinitive 😣] now represent U.S. immigration policy, which it isn’t.
Actually, the Statue was associated with immigration at least as early as its opening ceremony in 1886 — seventeen years prior to the addition of Emma Lazarus’s poem. At the ceremony, the U.S. President of the time, Grover Cleveland, gave a speech to dedicate it. In the dedication, he alluded to immigration. And the term that the man used is noteworthy.
Anti-immigrationists
frequently employ the term
open borders as a pejorative. Yet President Cleveland spoke glowingly of how the Statue of Liberty stands before “the open gates of America.”
We know that Cleveland is here consciously alluding to immigration, as it was a topic on which he commented publicly throughout his presidential terms. He had generally wanted to favor immigrants from everywhere, but he was not completely consistent. When gangs of white-supremacists engaged in vigilante actions against Chinese immigrants, Cleveland
properly condemned the violence. Yet, sadly, he ultimately
capitulated to pressure from the racists and said that ultimately whites and those of East Asian descent could not coexist in the same neighborhoods. He thus relented to calls for restrictions on Chinese immigration.
Cleveland comes across better when it comes to the nativist clamor against other sets of immigrants they hated. At the time, those from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe were not considered white. They were darker-skinned and darker-haired and mostly were Catholic or Jewish, castigated as racially distinct from the lighter-skinned Protestant majority. As most of these immigrants were impecunious and not fluent in English, legislation to discriminate against them involved Congressional bills allowing immigration only from those who could write in English. Fortunately, Cleveland successfully vetoed those bills,
explaining to Congress and the wider public,
It is said...that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens. . . .
I cannot believe that we would be protected against ...evils by limiting immigration to those who can read and write... In my opinion, it is infinitely more safe to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work...
It is Cleveland’s position on this matter that informs his mention of the open gates of America — gates that, naturally, also should have been open to those from East Asia.
I also appreciate how President Cleveland praised Liberty as the USA’s own pagan goddess, a much better object of worship. Thus, in his public speech at the inauguration for the Statue of Liberty, President Cleveland
orates,
We are not here to day to bow before the representation of a fierce and war-like god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but we joyously contemplate instead,
our own deity keeping watch and ward
before the open gates of America, and greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song. Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement.
We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires, and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic in the East [France]. Reflected thence and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until liberty enlightens the world [boldface added].
Yes, Liberty has always stood for the application of her principles, foremost of which is the liberty to seek new opportunities in new lands. She stood for liberalized immigration at her opening ceremony. May she continue to stand for it today.
