gracchusdixit

Reporting on an anti-immigrant protest in the small city of Murrieta, California, Fox News Channel began by juxtaposing the words “They’ve had enough!” with an image of the Statue of Liberty.  The words, of course, were intended to justify the behavior of the protestors, who showered profanity, racial slurs, and threats of physical violence on their hapless targets, three busloads of women and small children on their way to a nearby Border Patrol processing center.  The mayor of Murrieta seems to have instructed his police to protect the protestors rather than the immigrants they were trying to intimidate.  Later, he expressed, not regret, but “pride” in the protestors for exercising their “right to free speech”.

To associate such people with the Stature of Liberty is both ironic and deeply shameful.  For more than a century, “Lady Liberty” has symbolized our country’s welcoming embrace of immigrants from around the globe, and the words inscribed on the base of the statue have come to signify everything that is generous and decent about our country:

“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!”

There was a time when millions of Americans knew these words by heart and could recite them from memory, because they recognized that they or their parents or their grandparents had come to this country precisely as the words say—as “wretched refuse…yearning to breathe free”.

The anti-immigrant protestors in Murrieta and elsewhere in our country seem to have forgotten not only what Lady Liberty stands for but their own origins.  There is no American who is not an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants.  The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth were immigrants.  The Dutch poltroons were immigrants.  The Cavalier lords of Maryland were immigrants.  The Scots, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, and Scandinavian masses who poured into the country throughout the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were immigrants.  Even the people we call “Native Americans” were immigrants from the frozen land mass of Asia.

It is not good enough to draw a line between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants, to say that the one group came here the “right way” and the other got here the “wrong way”.  The Puritans had no visas.  The Dutch did not pass through the halls of Ellis Island with identity papers in hand.  The only “documentation” possessed by the countless slaves who came here in chains was a bill of sale.  How many of the other millions who poured into this country—the Irish fleeing famine, the Italians escaping poverty and revolution, the Jews and Slavs running from pogroms and tyranny—came here “legally”?  We shall never know.

It is not good enough to draw a line between those who “make” and those who do “take,” between those who “pay taxes” and those who “don’t”.   Immigrants built the transcontinental railroad.  Immigrants manned the factories and worked the farms that turned this country into the productive powerhouse of the world.  Immigrants came here then, and come here now, to work, paying taxes even when the taxes they pay buy them no legal protections or rights.  Immigrants, legal and illegal, made this country and without them this country would not exist.

Nor is it good enough to deplore “amnesty” as if there were something terrible in that.  We gave amnesty to the slave owners and secessionists of the Confederacy after they tore this country apart.  We gave amnesty to the worst of our enemies in the Second World War after they tried to annihilate us.  And we have given amnesty, more than once, to illegal immigrants after they proved themselves to be hard-working and law-abiding Americans.  It was Ronald Reagan, of all people, who said: “I believe in amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.”  Even Reagan was wise enough to realize that “sometime back” countless Americans “entered illegally”.

And it is certainly not good enough to draw an arbitrary and self-serving line between “real Americans” and everyone else.  Those who assert that they, and they alone, are authentically American may be able to fool themselves, but they can’t fool anyone else. This was not a barren or empty land when the first white Europeans arrived.  Every inch of it was stolen from someone else, often violently and in blood.

We are all “wretched refuse,” and the only thing that entitles us to call ourselves Americans is the “yearning to breathe free”.  When real Americans encounter that yearning in others, they do not shut their eyes, turn their backs, and harden their hearts.  Real Americans lift the lamp of freedom and open wide the golden door.