Sealing the golden door behind us

A quintessential American poem offers an alternative to the nativism on display at the RNC

Note: Readers may recognize this as the complete version of a very (very, very) rough draft I accidentally published a few weeks ago. Since the plan was to post it on the fourth of July, I was originally going to just can this one as a lost cause. But after some developments at the Republican National Convention last week, I thought it would be worthwhile to rework and re-release it. If you did happen to catch that early work-in-progress, then I’ll just hope you agree that this is a poem worth reading twice.

---

Since I started this newsletter nearly a year ago, it was clear that immigration was a topic that couldn’t really go unaddressed. This is a space to talk about the intersection of place and politics, and immigration falls squarely in the middle of that Venn diagram. I’ve avoided the subject mainly because I’m not an expert in immigration policy. I know we have significant challenges in this area right now; I know border states are struggling; and I know that conditions on the border are dire. But neither I nor this post are sources you should turn to for a master long-term plan to address immigration safely, effectively, and humanely.

But one thing I do know a bit about is political communication, and how the issue of immigration has been used, and abused, over the years to score points in elections. Which brings me to night three of last week’s Republican National Convention, and one of the most unsettling sets of images I’ve seen yet in what’s already been a pretty unsettling presidential campaign.

(Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Throughout the evening, RNC delegates gleefully waved red, white, and blue placards reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” One of the evening’s speakers was former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief Tom Homan, who laid out a dire warning:"I’ve got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden has released in our country in violation of federal law: You better start packing now." The crowd roared its approval with religious fervor.

The evening’s speeches went on like this, delivered with a mixture of righteous anger and zealous joy. This wasn’t a crowd looking to soberly and mindfully fix the holes in our immigration system (although we can and we should); this was nativist swarm, waving their placards like torches and pitchforks, reveling in the possibility of sending so many millions away from a country they profess to love.

The RNC was just a political and communications exercise, but this kind of gleeful, trolling anger has been embodied in a lot of the smaller-scale policy choices made by Republican governors in border or near-border states. In some cases, migrants were bussed to major cities like Chicago, New York, or Washington, DC, where at least there were likely to be jobs, resources, and immigration courts where asylum-seekers could continue their migration process. These actions are far from ideal and have created capacity problems for these cities, but there at least is a policy rationale here; border cities like El Paso, Texas have been overwhelmed by immigration, and sharing the burden with other states is at least reasonable on its face.

In other cases, however, there has appeared to be no motivation for the actions outside of sheer cruelty. Over the past two years, Governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida have purposely sought out migrants in their home states, promised them an array of resources and services, then moved them in droves to locations that are designed not to help them succeed, but instead to score political points against Democrats. In one infamous instance, Ron DeSantis flew a group of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, a wealthy island community off the coast of Massachusetts. Migrants were given a brochure, a list of resources for which none of them were eligible, and nothing else. In another, they were dropped off, courtesy of Gov. Abbott, directly in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve night, apparently to make a point of some kind about Biden administration policies.

These approaches to handling immigration are undoubtedly bleak — and, I think, not all that helpful to solving whatever complications that come with increased immigration. Thankfully, poetry offers us another path.

---

There are really only a handful of poems that have enough of a foothold in the public consciousness that most people — most Americans, anyway — would actually recognize if they heard them. Maybe we could recite a couple lines of Frosts’s “The Road Not Taken” from when we were forced to memorize it in high school; or maybe “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me” from my birthday buddy, Emily Dickinson. But I want to share another poem that, yes, has a famous set of lines — but which is, and contains within it, so much more.

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!”

---

The reason so many of you might know this poem — or more likely, recognize just the “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses” bit — is that it appears on a plaque in front of the poem’s famous subject in New York City. The inscription was placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, nearly twenty years after the statue was first dedicated by President Grover Cleveland in 1886. “You can’t think of the statue,” says the poet’s biographer, Dr. Esther Schor, “without hearing the words Emma Lazarus gave her.”

The Mother of Exiles herself, on a legendary Hunt family trip. New York City, 1995. Photo by Tom Hunt (thanks, Dad).

Besides the rich language and imagery, this poem is special to me because of its incredible boldness and willingness to go as far as possible in service of its central idea. Growing up, I was taught ably by my parents and other responsible adults in my life the importance of tolerance. There are people in this country, and outside of it, who are different from us. They may look or speak differently; may have different values, make different choices; they may come from somewhere else that we don’t understand. But not turning away from these people, and instead accepting these differences — in other words, practicing tolerance — is a way to demonstrate our most basic humanity.

But this poem, and the symbol of the statue it speaks of, goes provocatively further. We must go beyond simply tolerating immigrants coming to our shores and treating them with basic respect; this, for Lazarus’s “Colossus”, is not enough. Lady Liberty, embodied in the poem, takes it a step further by commanding the rest of the world to send us their “tired, [their] poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” The “wretched refuse”, the downtrodden of the world, are not merely accepted because it’s the right thing to do, but because of the understanding that immigrants make communities better, richer, and more diverse in ways that strengthen us. Our door is not just cracked open to the “huddled masses”; rather, like the statue, we face outward towards the rest of the world and hold up, high as we are able, a glowing torch of “worldwide welcome.”

“The New Colossus” is a bold expression of values that has more modern company in American art. One example: a song by the folk/Americana duo Watchhouse called “The Wolves” (Apple Music / Spotify), off of their 2019 album Tides of a Teardrop.

There she stands, so tall and mighty
With her keen and watchful eye
And the heart of a mother
Holding out her guiding light

In this hopeful interpretation, the “mighty woman” embodied by the statue is going out of her way to make our nation known to the world as a safe haven, as a place where all can thrive and let shine their own “imprisoned lightning” for the benefit of all.

---

But if the symbolism on display at the RNC make one thing clear, it’s that not everybody sees Lady Liberty as the “Mother of Exiles” that Lazarus lays out so poignantly in “The New Colossus.” Outside of the American flag itself, the Statue of Liberty is probably the most recognizable symbol of America that exists. It’s our Eiffel Tower, our Taj Mahal; this gives it enormous power in our culture and in our politics. It also makes makes it ripe for appropriation, and for those who believe in the exact opposite of Emma Lazarus’s message to seize on Lady Liberty, and to use her for their own purposes.

In a White House press conference back in 2017, Trump advisor and aspiring supervillian Stephen Miller was asked at the podium about the administration’s immigration policy, which Miller was more or less in charge of during his time in the White House. Part of the administration’s policy changes included tamping down on asylum seekers and banning immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Instead, they would prioritize “merit-based” green cards, the approval of which would depend on whether an immigrant had technical skills that the government deemed valuable.

Here’s the exchange at the press conference that followed between Miller and CNN’s Jim Acosta:

ACOSTA: The statute of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.’ It doesn't say anything about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer. Aren't you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country?

MILLER: I don't want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty enlightening the world. It's a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you're referring to that was added later is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.

Even if we’re being generous, Miller is only about half-right about this. Here’s the Emma Lazarus biographer I cited earlier, Dr. Esther Schor.

He was factually correct that the sonnet was not affixed to the statue until 1903, which is about 16 years after Emma Lazarus died. But she wrote the sonnet for the statue. She wrote it before the statue was erected in New York Harbor, and she wrote it to raise money for the Pedestal Fund… the Americans had promised to pay for the pedestal, and the French were going to give this statue as a gift from the French people to the people of the United States.

Regardless of historical accuracy, Miller clearly sees the statue not as a “Mother of Exiles,” but rather as the one symbol that Lazarus went out of her way to dispel in the first two lines of her poem: the “brazen giant of Greek fame/With conquering limbs astride from land to land.” In other words, we already have a perfect culture, the perfect freedoms, and all the answers. You will learn from us, you will mimic our perfect example; and above all, you will not ruin this perfection by sending us your “wretched refuse.” You will not, as Donald Trump has taken to putting it recently, “poison the blood of our country” with your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.

---

I’m sure I have sounded here like every conservative’s worst caricature of a “bleeding heart liberal”, willing to sacrifice all common sense and practicality at the altar of overwrought compassion. The truth is, the situation that’s currently unfolding at the southern border is actually not sustainable and does require our attention. As a country, we do have our limits in terms of both resources and capacity, and we’d be foolish and cruel to pretend like we don’t. I don’t have a solution, and Lazarus’s “Colossus” is not a policy proposal. But like the torch the Statue holds, it can be a guiding light if we choose it to be. It’s one we must try to follow if we want to preserve our soul and character as a welcoming and aspirational nation.

If we keep following the cruel examples we’ve seen here — from opportunistic governors to fervent convention-goers — I worry that the optimistic vision Emma Lazarus gives us in “The New Colossus” will slip away, and quickly. Earlier in this post, I cited the important and affecting song “The Wolves” by Watchhouse. Though it portrays the Statue of Liberty in the same fashion as Lazarus does, it transitions quickly into a lament; one in which fearful Americans, like cornered wolves, circle the wagons and seal the doors against all outsiders.

There she stands, so tall and mighty
Her gaze facing the east
At her back, our doors are closing
As we grin and bare our teeth…

On the wind the wolves are howling
Open arms are closed in fear
Helping hands are clenched in anger
Broken hearts beyond repair

I think we should take to heart the fact that presidents, governors, and border control practices will come and go; but that, barring a Day After Tomorrow-esque disaster, Lady Liberty will continue to stand tall, shining like a beacon that not just hopeful migrants arriving at our shores can follow in; but that we can also turn our eyes to as a reminder to welcome them whenever we possibly can. “The irony,” says Lazarus biographer Esther Schor, “is that the statue goes on speaking, even when the tide turns against immigration — even against immigrants themselves, as they adjust to their American lives.”

The Statue of Liberty, beloved and universally recognized, will be fought over and seized upon for decades to come, as she has in the decades since she was first erected just a few hundred yards from Ellis Island. But the good news is that if we don’t want to, we don’t have to buy in to the view of Lady Liberty as a hubristic brag that freedom belongs only to “real Americans,” whatever that means. We get to decide, as a people, what an “American life” is and what it is owed. I hope we make the right choice.