By Selwyn Duke ——Bio and Archives--February 2, 2018
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1. Many now see the poem’s most famous line, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” as a policy statement. In fact, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright (Halfbright?) tweeted last year, “There is no fine print on the Statue of Liberty. America must remain open to people of all faiths & backgrounds. #RefugeesWelcome.” “Fine print,” of course, is the way you speak of law or a contract. That the poem is being used this way should give everyone pause. 2. “The New Colossus” was an example of 19th-century virtue signaling. It’s also more than troubling that policy is being influenced by sentiments that most don’t even know have a socialist pedigree. In fact, as a socialist, Lazarus could be seen as having been an (unwitting) enemy of America. Having said this, she’s not the only 19th-century socialist shaping policy — there’s Bernie Sanders, too.
3. Today, the huddled masses aren’t yearning to breathe free; they’re yearning for free stuff. Immigration ain’t what it used to be, and romanticizing immigrants distorts reality; being people, they include the good, the bad and the ugly. I’d sooner see the romanticizing of citizens, though truth beats incessant pep talks any day. 4. Created by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the Statue of Liberty was originally intended to symbolize the principles of international republicanism; again, it had nothing to do with immigration. And as with the Constitution, we’d do well to return to original intent. This is especially true because the huddled-masses bit now buttresses what I dubbed immigrationism, the bizarre notion that immigration is always good, always necessary and should be the one constant in an ever-changing universe of policy. Yet with 85 to 90 percent of today’s immigrants hailing from the Third World and 70 to 90 percent of them voting for freedom-squelching Democrats upon naturalization, there’s an irony here: The phenomenon now represented by the Statue of Liberty is destroying liberty.This, of course, is why leftists love today’s immigration. If most of these huddled masses voted GOP, the Democrats would have long ago changed the statue’s plaque to read, “America is full. Stay wherever the heck you are.”
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