What Would Emma Lazarus Think?
By Michael Kaufman
What, I wonder, would Emma Lazarus think of our national debate over healthcare reform? Although she has been gone for more than a century, Lazarus is well remembered for the final lines of her uplifting sonnet, “The New Colossus,” engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty. In the poem she refers to the statue as “Mother of Exiles.”
“Give me your tired, your poor,” she wrote.
“Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
“The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
“I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus
Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883, following a wave of immigration by multitudes of destitute eastern European Jews who had been expelled from the Russian Pale of Settlement. I think my grandparents on both sides were among them. Many Americans back then did not share the welcoming sentiments expressed in the poem, as evidenced by the country’s discriminatory immigration policies.
Until the immigration law was changed in 1965, notes Stephen Klineburg, a sociologist at Rice University in Houston, “it was just unbelievable in its clarity of racism. It declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race. The Nordics were superior to the Alpines, who in turn were superior to the Mediterraneans, and all of them were superior to the Jews and the Asians.” Needless to say, even the lowly Jews and Asians were considered superior to the black and brown peoples of Africa and the Americas.
The blatant discrimination was manifested in signs posted in public places and even in newspaper ads: “No Jews or Dogs Allowed,” “No Chinese,” “No Irish Need Apply,” “Whites Only.” In later years it got more subtle. Hotels in the Poconos that discriminated against Jews included the words “churches nearby” in their ads. On the other hand, Jews were welcome at Catskills hotels that included “dietary laws strictly observed” in their advertisements.
By the early 1960s, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese, and Italians–inspired by the burgeoning civil rights movement among African-Americans–began voicing complaints about the discriminatory immigration quotas. President John F. Kennedy called for reform of the immigration law a few months before he was assassinated. Immigration reform then became a major cause championed by his brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Unfortunately, the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of immigrants are among those now voicing complaints against “illegal aliens,” specifically with regard to the question of healthcare reform. Have they forgotten that their own people were once the victims of immigration quotas? Are they unaware that their parents (or grandparents) were vilified for the burden they would place on healthcare because of the diseases they would allegedly bring into the country? Or that they were condemned for speaking foreign languages instead of English?
How many of us who are descended from immigrants can be sure that our own family members were not among the undocumented? It was not long ago that so many Italians came “without papers” that an abbreviation of those words became a nasty anti-Italian slur. The anti-Semitic term “kike” is said to be derived from the Yiddish word for “circle”– because Jewish immigrants unable to write their names would mark a circle on official documents in the place where their non-Jewish counterparts placed an x.
Today it is the mostly Spanish-speaking “illegal aliens” who are scorned to such an extent that even President Obama is afraid to speak out on behalf of their basic human right to healthcare. This is a tacit acceptance of the lie put forth by opponents of reform that the “illegals,” not the profit-hungry insurance companies, are responsible for the current high cost of healthcare.
What would Emma Lazarus think of this debate? I’d say not very much.
Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.
Tags: Michael Kaufman
