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Forget the huddled masses
Treating immigrants as a charity case is not working: time to change course
IMMIGRATION reform in America is stuck. Blame Emma Lazarus, who wrote the 1883 sonnet anointing the Statue of Liberty a “Mother of Exilesâ€, urging the old world to send “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe freeâ€.
Lazarus is only accidentally to blame for the partisan deadlock that grips immigration reform, raising the ghastly prospect that a broken system will remain unfixed until after the 2014 mid-term elections, and possibly the presidential contest of 2016. Lazarus wrote her poem to help raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. She ignored the stated purpose of the colossal sculpture (a French-built homage to America’s republican government) focusing instead on her concern over Jewish pogroms in Russia. Her words were almost forgotten, surviving on a plaque on an inner wall of the pedestal. They achieved fame decades after her death, as the statue became associated with the immigration station on Ellis Island and Nazi persecution made refugee policies urgently political. In 1945 the poem, set in bronze, was moved to the statue’s main entrance. Soon afterwards it was put to music by Irving Berlin.
To this day Lazarus’s sentiments have an outsize impact, argues Peter Skerry of Boston College, a political scientist specialising in immigration. In 14 lines, she managed to cast America—in reality a raucous young nation built by the brains and brawn of newcomers—as a sort of Lady Bountiful, selflessly extending asylum to the poorest and most wretched. Americans embraced that image of immigration as a form of charity. Yet most migrants are not tired or exceptionally poor. Undocumented workers are mostly young, have the means to pay people-smugglers or buy an air ticket, and come to work for higher pay than they could earn at home. Most are not refugees; many would be horrified to be called the “wretched refuse†of anyone’s teeming shore.
Yet modern campaigners for comprehensive immigration reform tend to play on heartstrings. Jump onto the website of Organising For Action (OFA), a never-demobilised arm of the 2012 Obama campaign, and a whole section is devoted to immigration—specifically calling on the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to take up a bipartisan immigration plan passed in the summer by the Senate. A quote from Lazarus has pride of place on the OFA site, alongside life stories of migrants, showing the human costs of inaction.
That compassion-driven approach has new allies from within the conservative movement. In October pastors from megachurches, evangelical ministers and leaders from such outfits as the Southern Baptist Convention lobbied members of Congress and organised eight days of nationwide prayer, citing gospel teachings about feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, and inviting in the stranger.
Treating immigrants as a charity case is not working: time to change course
IMMIGRATION reform in America is stuck. Blame Emma Lazarus, who wrote the 1883 sonnet anointing the Statue of Liberty a “Mother of Exilesâ€, urging the old world to send “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe freeâ€.
Lazarus is only accidentally to blame for the partisan deadlock that grips immigration reform, raising the ghastly prospect that a broken system will remain unfixed until after the 2014 mid-term elections, and possibly the presidential contest of 2016. Lazarus wrote her poem to help raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. She ignored the stated purpose of the colossal sculpture (a French-built homage to America’s republican government) focusing instead on her concern over Jewish pogroms in Russia. Her words were almost forgotten, surviving on a plaque on an inner wall of the pedestal. They achieved fame decades after her death, as the statue became associated with the immigration station on Ellis Island and Nazi persecution made refugee policies urgently political. In 1945 the poem, set in bronze, was moved to the statue’s main entrance. Soon afterwards it was put to music by Irving Berlin.
To this day Lazarus’s sentiments have an outsize impact, argues Peter Skerry of Boston College, a political scientist specialising in immigration. In 14 lines, she managed to cast America—in reality a raucous young nation built by the brains and brawn of newcomers—as a sort of Lady Bountiful, selflessly extending asylum to the poorest and most wretched. Americans embraced that image of immigration as a form of charity. Yet most migrants are not tired or exceptionally poor. Undocumented workers are mostly young, have the means to pay people-smugglers or buy an air ticket, and come to work for higher pay than they could earn at home. Most are not refugees; many would be horrified to be called the “wretched refuse†of anyone’s teeming shore.
Yet modern campaigners for comprehensive immigration reform tend to play on heartstrings. Jump onto the website of Organising For Action (OFA), a never-demobilised arm of the 2012 Obama campaign, and a whole section is devoted to immigration—specifically calling on the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to take up a bipartisan immigration plan passed in the summer by the Senate. A quote from Lazarus has pride of place on the OFA site, alongside life stories of migrants, showing the human costs of inaction.
That compassion-driven approach has new allies from within the conservative movement. In October pastors from megachurches, evangelical ministers and leaders from such outfits as the Southern Baptist Convention lobbied members of Congress and organised eight days of nationwide prayer, citing gospel teachings about feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, and inviting in the stranger.
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