Wretched Refuse of Our Own Teeming Shores: réfugiés américains

La Liberté éclairant le monde, in English Liberty Enlightening the World, is the name of a statue designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. While talking with other French abolitionists in the mid 1860s, he became inspired with the idea of a monument to America’s independence and to the ending of slavery in the United States that had just been accomplished at the conclusion of the American Civil War. More than 20 years later, a gigantic copper version of this statue had been completed, with its metal framework having been built by the French civil engineer and architect Gustave Eiffel, who gained further fame shortly after that for building the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Most commonly called the Statue of Liberty, it was dedicated in New York City on October 28, 1886, as a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States. As part of the ceremony, the first ever ticker-tape parade was held.

A little over a year later, the poet Emma Lazarus died at the age of 38. In 1883, she had written a sonnet to help in the fundraising campaign for constructing the pedestal that the statue is placed atop. And in 1903, her poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside this pedestal. Its words are often used to express the ideal of America as the hope and the refuge to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world:

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!”

Now we look out across this land and see a country that appears befuddled and desultory and corrupted. This country that at its birth and with its birth and by its birth blazoned to all the world the universal grail of liberty for all is now a country that seems unable to provide basic learning, shelter, sustenance, health, or safety for even all its own children, a country that seems unable to bring even all its own children together in fairness or resoluteness or trust or shared purpose, a country that seems unable to build an economy that can offer even all its own children the opportunity of working and contributing to their society and of joining with each other to lift up that lamp to all the world—a world that no longer looks to America for hope or inspiration or leadership but that looks on America with shock and horror at the spectacle of its barbarity and terrorizing atrocity and heinous injustice toward even its own children.

Now with half of our own citizens turned into refugees in our own land, we must ask what has happened to those principles and ideals that gave our nation its birth and made it the envy of and the hope of and the beacon to the rest of the world.