The Golden Door

As I continue to think and pray about immigration in the United States, I am haunted by Emma Lazarus' 1883 poem, cast in bronze at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, of which every American primary and secondary student learns a portion somewhere along the line:

The New Colossus
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!"

My concerns about laws surrounding immigration are humbled before the recognition that our present society owes its being to the invitation of "wretched refuse" to occupy this continent. From the very generation in which Ms. Lazarus wrote, I can trace at least two ancestors of mine who were empowered to begin new lives because they had free entry to American ports and freedom to work in American society.

There may be reasons to reconsider, in 2013, the perspective lauded by The New Colossus, but I want desperately not to dispense with it.

~ emrys