Emma Lazarus: The Poet as Politician

They are the best-known lines of poetry on a public monument in America:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Most people who recognize them can also identify where they are inscribed — on the base of the Statue of Liberty.  More than a few can also name the poet who wrote them — Emma Lazarus — who is otherwise obscure 175 years after her birth.

The reason for Lazarus’ persistence in our nation’s collective memory is that she is regularly invoked by those who support expanded legal immigration and oppose efforts to reduce illegal immigration.  Those who, by contrast, attempt to put the poem in context by reference to historical facts are roundly derided as heartless philistines.

Take the case Ken Cuccinelli, former director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who in 2019 suggested that the words “and who will not become a public charge” should be added, and pointed out that the people referred to in the poem “were coming from Europe.”  A “near-immediate backlash bubbled up” in the words of a Slate magazine article, which said Cuccinelli’s “edit makes a mockery of the poem’s intent.” (READ MORE from Con Chapman: God Save the Suburbs)

But the first claim accurately reflects what is currently and has long been American legal immigration policy, and the second claim is true.  “The New Colossus” was written in 1883; in the preceding year Congress passed the 1882 Immigration Act, which denied entry to “any lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.”  No reference has been found to the 1882 Immigration Act in any of Lazarus’s letters, so she can’t be accused of opposing the public charge test; it remains a part of American immigration law, revised most recently in 2021, to reject those who are determined likely to become “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence,” either through “public cash assistance or long-term institutionalization at government expense.”  As for the latter claim, between 1861 and 1890, a three-decade period that over-lapped with twenty-five years of Lazarus’s life, 10.4 million immigrants were admitted to the United States, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe.  The horror expressed in response to attempts such as Cuccinelli’s to counter the poem’s misuse is thus more theatrics than substance.

Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” as a contribution to a campaign to raise funds for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, which had been donated to the United States by France.  She initially declined the request of William Maxwell Evarts, a Republican lawyer who led the drive, but a friend urged her to reconsider, citing the work she did at a camp for Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia.  Lazarus came from a wealthy Jewish family whose ancestors had arrived in New York (then New Amsterdam) in 1654 fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. The concern of her social class was that the new arrivals from Eastern Europe would become public charges and bring disrepute upon American Jews generally.

So it was a very specific group of immigrants that Lazarus had in mind when she wrote “The New Colossus,” and not a blank check for unlimited or illegal immigration.  Her work on behalf of impoverished Jewish refugees helped them become self-sufficient; she began by writing a muckraking newspaper article about them, and as a result their plight came to the attention of a cannery owner who offered them jobs.  She taught them English, raised money for their support, and worked at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society Employment Bureau to help them find jobs so that they would not become dependent on public assistance.  That these immigrants were the focus of “The New Colossus” may be gleaned from other works by Lazarus, such as “The Dance to Death,” a five-act tragedy that recalls pogroms going back to the Middle Ages.

Those who enter the U.S. illegally today bypass restrictions in addition to the “public charge” test that were in force when Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus,” and which remain in effect today for valid public policy reasons.  Among those so barred are the unvaccinated, those with communicable diseases and physical or mental disorders; criminals and prostitutes; and spies and terrorists.  None of these would have made it through the nation’s first federal immigration station on Ellis Island, where her words remain engraved in bronze today. (READ MORE: Horace Mann: America’s Favorite Bigot Who Elevated Educators Over Parents)

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but only a very literal mind would take that line literally.  We don’t cite Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” when designing highway off-ramps, and we shouldn’t use “The New Colossus” as a one-poem-fits-all solution to immigration issues.

Con Chapman is the author of Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good.

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