About Those ‘Huddled Masses’

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Mark Steyn takes aim at Emma Lazarus:

UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, who insisted that there’s no difference between the once supposedly unassimilable Irish Catholics and East European Jews and the new Pushtun goatherds and Mogadishu hoodlums. It’s one of the curious aspects of self-proclaimed “multiculturalists” that they are, essentially, uniculturalists: they think everybody’s the same.
But sometimes history doesn’t repeat itself — and Emma Lazarus’ lousy poem is an even lousier guide to social policy.

Was her poem “The New Colossus” really that bad? No, I think the problem is in the interpretation, in the same way that the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment has become a problem. In the minds of some people, among them Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is a python that swallows whole the rest of the Constitution, including the First and Tenth Amendments, so that the entire purpose of the federal government, according to this view, is to impose “equality” everywhere.

In his 1993 book Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution, the late M.E. Bradford noted the way in which people conflate the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, so that phrases like “all men are created equal” and “the pursuit of happiness” attain in their minds the force of law. Jefferson’s expressions of lofty ideals, which some shallow minds never study carefully in their historic context, are then smuggled into the Constitution where they fornicate with the phrase “a more perfect Union,” thus breeding a bastard child — a mandate that the teleological purpose of the federal government is to make America “more perfect,” which is to say more “equal,” and also to guarantee “happiness” for everyone. Trying to get liberals to understand what’s wrong with this bastardized idea of the Founders’ intent is nearly hopeless. Justice Kennedy has obviously ceased to give a damn about the Constitution, so that the late Antonin Scalia went to his grave absolutely correct, and yet on the losing end of the crucial 5-4 majorities in Lawrence v. Texas, U.S. v. Windsor, and Obergefell v. Hodges.

Well, what does this have to do with Emma Lazarus? In the same way a few phrases from the Declaration get smuggled into the Constitution by liberals, so also have a few phrases from Lazarus’s famous poem about the Statue of Liberty attained legal authority in shallow minds. Peter Brimelow made a point of this in his excellent 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. How is it that poetic phrases and the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty have become practically the only things so many people know about U.S. immigration policy?

Much like the problem with the Fourteenth Amendment, it seems impossible to get liberals to confront actual facts about immigration.

For all their blithe chatter about “critical thinking,” The Smart People™ don’t seem to do much of it. If a fact contradicts whatever is currently the Democrat mania, liberals always find some reason to dismiss this fact as irrelevant, or else to explain it away as having a liberal meaning, opposite to an obvious common-sense interpretation.

Here, let us cite “The New Colossus” in its entirety:

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!”

Now, what is “the imprisoned lightning”? Liberty, which Lazarus correctly identifies as the great principle of the American nation. And why were the “huddled masses” and “wretched refuse” — the immigrants aboard ships steaming into the “air-bridged harbor” of New York — “yearning to breath free”? Do we know anything about these “ancient lands” of “storied pomp” from which these “Exiles” had come in search of their adoptive “Mother”? And what of Liberty herself, as symbol of the nation that extended this “world-wide welcome”?

Liberty and History, Policy and Poetry

It so happened that the Statue of Liberty was given to the United States by the citizens of France in 1776, commemorating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Considering that France had been our ally in the War of Independence against England, this gift was meant to remind Americans of France’s friendship and, considering that the French had recently gotten their imperial butts kicked in the Franco-Prussian War, France certainly could expect to need help from its friends going forward. This bit of historical context, you see, gives us a rather more cynical understanding of what the Statue of Liberty was really all about. Within 40 years of this gift, French soldiers would be bleeding to death under German machine-gun fire on the battlefields of World War One, into which America was inexorably drawn. And of course, again in World War Two, it became America’s job to save those “ancient lands” of “storied pomp” from the menace of German militarism.

Was any of that in the mind of Emma Lazarus when she wrote her poem “The New Colossus”? Of course not. She was a poet, not a diplomatic strategist, nor was she advocating any change in U.S. policy. She wrote her poem in 1883 — after the statue had been raised on an island in the harbor — which was almost the exact middle of the 80-year span, roughly 1840 to 1920, that Brimelow calls the “Era of Mass Immigration.” This era began at a time before the advent of steamships and locomotives, when America was still expanding its frontiers westward. It was not until U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) that California and the Southwest were added to our national territory, so that these vast expanses of sparsely populated western lands beckoned for settlers. You see that the “Era of Mass Immigration” got underway at a time when there was an organic demand for additional population here in the “Mother of Exiles,” and the vast expansion of U.S. industry — coal, steel, textiles, etc. — during subsequent decades meant that Liberty had a tremendous need for those “huddled masses.”

What about the “ancient lands” from which these exiles arrived? Well, in 1883, the ships that Emma Lazarus saw streaming into New York harbor past the Statue of Liberty contained a lot of Greeks and Italians. Indeed, the erstwhile empires of Greco-Roman fame had a lot of “storied pomp,” as did the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both of which were even then teetering toward their final destruction in World War One. The contrast between the decadent empires of Europe, and the land of Liberty — a “mighty woman with a torch” — was certainly worthy of a poet’s notice, but the historian and the statesman must consider the sources of this contrast. Why had ancient Greece and Rome gone downhill? Why was Russia so backward and its government so despotic? Why was the Hapsburg dynasty unable to sustain harmony among its polyglot subjects? None of those questions interested Emma Lazarus who, although an excellent writer, was not a student of political, military or diplomatic history, the schools of statesmanship. We have no reason to believe Emma Lazarus was especially adept at economics or any other subject necessary to a study of immigration as public policy and, in fact, there is evidence that she was quite ignorant of U.S. policy circa 1883.

Whereas her poem has Liberty proclaiming “world-wide welcome” in New York harbor, on the West Coast, a policy of excluding Chinese and Japanese immigrants was being enforced in California — the “Yellow Peril” and all that — and Liberty herself was at that time not much interested in the “huddled masses” of black people, either as immigrants or among the former slaves who had quite recently gained their freedom from chattel slavery. In the so-called “Corrupt Bargain” of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes had become president in exchange for an agreement by Republicans to end the military enforcement of Reconstruction in the South. In effect, the North gave its tacit assent to Jim Crow in the South, in order to maintain Republican control of the White House. Furthermore, as Southerners then and since have taken pains to point out, the treatment of black people in the North was not exactly in keeping with the lofty sentiments of “equality” and “liberty” that were so often invoked when Republicans waved “the Bloody Shirt” in election campaigns. Schools in the North were generally segregated, and black residents in Northern cities were mostly quite poor and restricted to living in certain neighborhoods, and there were few if any black immigrants responding to Liberty’s “world-wide welcome” in 1883. There was no shortage of outright racism in New York and other Northern cities at that time and, particularly in New England, the Republican Party gained votes by the tremendous ethnic and religious hostility toward Irish Catholics among the Yankee descendants of English Puritans.

All of that historic background as to the politics and policy of the United States circa 1883 is absent from the minds of those idiots (useful or otherwise) for whom the stirring poetry of Emma Lazarus has been transmogrified into a mandate for an open-borders immigration policy.

Every sound principle of statesmanship argues against this absurd idea that America should make “world-wide welcome” its policy, without any exception or numerical limit, and yet poetic sentiment has somehow replaced statesmanship as the basis of policy discussion.

‘Truth Is Great and Will Prevail’

What we suffer from most is an unwillingness to speak frankly, either about the reality of American history, or the nature of the problems we face in the present, or about the likely future consequences if we do not soon do something to solve these problems. As I have often reminded readers here, there are five A’s in “RAAAAACIST!” and a fear of being smeared as such tends to inhibit the honesty of conservatives when dealing with issues like this. Yet we have seen over and over, especially in the Obama Era, that conservatives will be labeled racists — excuse me, “RAAAAACIST!” — no matter what they say or do.

Another major problem is that conservatives, mindful of protecting the reputation of the Republican Party, are unwilling to tell the truth about the GOP’s actual history. Of course, Democrats have their own bogus propaganda version of history, hiding their long record of supporting slavery and Jim Crow, but it does not help the Republican Party for conservatives to flinch from the truth of their own past. There is a huge and significant difference between virtue and self-righteousness, and that difference can be summarized in a single word, honesty. Conservative spokesmen need to stop worrying so much about maintaining and enhancing their personal reputations, and instead focus on telling the plain truth, no matter how unpopular the truth might be.

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786

If we wish to preserve “the imprisoned lightning” of Liberty, you see, we need to tell the truth, and we need to start asking the right questions. Who are these “huddled masses,” and does Liberty need quite so many of them today as she needed in 1883? Are all the “wretched refuse” equally eligible for this “world-wide welcome”? Is it possible that, by permitting a floodtide of illegal immigration, America could lose Liberty herself?

Thank God for Mark Steyn, himself an immigrant, who is willing to ask tough questions and to provide truthful answers. We now find ourselves confronted with the spectacle of the “ancient lands” of Europe being drowned by an endless tsunami of Muslim immigration. Jean Rapail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is being acted out in front of our eyes on a daily basis — at least, if we are paying attention to what is actually happening in Europe — and only a fool could fail to recognize what this might mean for America. Whether we are concerned about the astonishing wave of Mexican immigration and radicals who envision the Reconquista of Atzlan, or the enclaves of Palestinians, Pakistanis and Somalis scattered around various U.S. cities, it is obvious that the current immigration system is a complete failure, and advocates of so-called “comprehensive” reform are likely to make the problem even worse.

Nowadays, it seems, the “huddled masses” are not the immigrants, whose alleged “rights” are celebrated by the influential elites in both major parties. Rather, the “huddled masses” in 2016 are American citizens who find that almost no one in power, not even among those who claim to be “conservative,” will defend the rights and interests of our own people.





 


67 comments

  1. Those huddled masses were yearning to breathe free.

    Not yearning to impose slavery upon us.

    Just the teeniest shade of nuance there.

  2. Lazarus poetically attempted to capture the uniqueness of “American-ness.” That is, it is predicated upon an idea–if imperfectly acted upon–rather than blood or origin. The “huddled masses” by and large desired to be left alone to live their lives the way they wanted without meddling or persecution from the government.

    The shift, of course, has the focus upon economic issues–the “poor” part of those masses, and the idea that somehow, our success has come at the expense of the various “Turdistans” which exist all over the world. That is, we owe these people something beyond a life of free from societal intrusion. This is a) the inevitable result of Leftist/Progressive zero-sum thinking, i.e. “I’m happy, therefore someone somewhere must be sad,” and b) leads to the mult-culturalism nonsense we see. If we owe the world something because of our success, we have no right to demand fidelity to the idea held by the founders.

  3. Our esteemed host wrote:

    It so happened that the Statue of Liberty was given to the United States by the citizens of France in 1776, commemorating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence.

    That should be 1876.

  4. The idea of the “proposition nation” is fatally flawed simply because of the outworking of human nature. That the founders didn’t found such a “nation,” is shown by preamble to the constitution where they state clearly that it was for their posterity – their “blood,” if you will.

  6. I think you’re taking a narrow view of “posterity.” The broader view is “those who come after.” The individual colonies which became the thirteen states were formed from very disparate people: Rich noblemen, convicts, Catholic and Protestant refugees. Immigration policy was predicated upon fidelity to the idea of “America” and not loyalty to some Old World clan. Yes, people segregated themselves into communities, but when the chips were down, it was expected that those Old World ties would be subordinated to the new “America.” See, e.g. the history of German immigration to this country which was initially decried in the 1830s-1840s. It took the Civil War and the near unanimous enlistment of German immigrants into the Union cause to change the perception. (Woodrow Wilson, fomented significant anti-German immigrant emotions during WWI, for no reason other than to affect the Progressive Agenda, thereby destroying a half-century of goodwill resulting from the German casualties of the Civil War.)

  8. I propose this from Teddy Roosevelt should replace Lazarus’ poem at the base of the statue of liberty.

    ”There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all … The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic … There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

    Further I would advocate John Quincy Adams’ description of Islam should be the preamble to any and all immigration legislation.

    http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_21_1/tsc_21_1_candid_observations_islam.shtml

  10. What a lot of people don’t realize that the wierd feminists are part and parcel of the progressive agenda to change the meaning of the Constitution.

  12. I am taking a narrow view of “posterity” and I think they did as well. They give us no reason to think it is their political posterity, although, effectively, that would make little difference.
    There was a very large slug of German immigrants as a result of the doings in Germany around 1848. Their political leanings were nothing like those of the founders. To say that they were anything akin to what the founders would have considered their posterity is more than a stretch.

  13. ?He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.?
    — U.S. Declaration of Independence

    ?To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;?
    — U.S. Constitution – The Powers of Congress, Article 1 Section 8

    Seems to me the Founders preferred a broader definition, including a political posterity.

  14. Rich noblemen, convicts, Catholic and Protestant refugees.

    IIRC, the peerage and gentry combined constituted only about 1% of colonial-era settlers. The Catholic share of the colonial population as well, and hardly evident outside of Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The treatment of Catholics in Maryland (who constituted about 1/10th of the population therein) during the period running from ca. 1645 to ca. 1830 would likely have generated refugees, not attracted them.

    I think resettlement of convicts was more characteristic of Australia’s history (though overstated with regard to Australia as well).

  15. Rather, the “huddled masses” in 2016 are American citizens who find that
    almost no one in power, not even among those who claim to be
    “conservative,” will defend the rights and interests of our own people.

    Because AM McConnell is concerned only with Capitol Hill gamesmanship and fellating the Chamber of Commerce and various donor groups. Paul Ryan is an open-borders ideologue.

  16. Rather, the “huddled masses” in 2016 are American citizens who find that
    almost no one in power, not even among those who claim to be
    “conservative,” will defend the rights and interests of our own people.

    You realize the social segment from which the legal profession and a large mass of Congress is drawn does not viscerally see the working-class majority as ‘their own people’, and the shmucks who run higher education certainly do not. Working people are just pairs of hands and have obscurantist attitudes which must be annulled by judicial decrees. “Their own people” for the bicoastal professional managerial bourgeoisie would be anyone in their strata anywhere.

  17. The declaration is nice poetry, but has no application constitutionally. The other, once more, is simply a stretch. They knew there would immigrants and they were simply making allowances for acquiring citizenship. They were providing a framework of rule of law for their posterity. You can assert that they were talking political posterity, but that’s your choice.

  18. Oh great, now we hear from the math Nazis…

    Stop oppressing us with your heteronormative arithmetic, you h8r!

  20. Or… you may not be interested in weird feminists, but weird feminists are interested in YOU!

  21. Thanks to that Nick Cage movie (National Treasure sequel) I know that there are three such statues.

  23. Ah, but we’re not talking about law.

    We’re talking about the Founders’ view of posterity.

    The bit from the DOI shows that view well before the nation began.

  24. I was thinking of Georgia (convicts), Maryland (Lord Baltimore), Rhode Island (Roger Williams and Baptists fleeing Massachusetts and the Puritans), Massachusetts (Puritans).

    My comment was not to be a complete demographic analysis of the Thirteen Colonies, but to point out the things which animated the Founders.

    The declaration is nice poetry, but has no application constitutionally.

    So stipulated. So what? We’re talking about animating principles here. The United States preceded the Constitution.(Peace Be Upon It). The fact of the matter is, every wave of immigration has seen its detractors. It was only when the immigrants proved a commitment to American-ness–the idea of the United States–that they were accepted.

    And rightfully so, I might add.

  26. Switzerland is an interesting case study. First, it’s the closest to a direct democracy as can be imagined. Second, there are absolute term limits. Third, its legislature has people from all walks of life and socioeconomic levels. There is no professional political class. Fourth, it is a multi-ethnic society whose people embrace their linguistic differences while maintaining their “Swiss” identity.

    It’s been a politically stable republic for longer than we have incidentally.

  27. I think Switzerland had some severe intramural conflicts ca. 1795 and ca. 1848, so, after the Revolutionary War but before the Civil War. As a discrete entity, it pre-dates British North America by three centuries, but regarding the precise contours of its institutional life, it is not our senior. IIRC, their constitution today is derived from their 1848 constitution.

    What’s salient about Switzerland (and one thing admired by Gottfried Dietze) would be the vibrancy of its local government. The people who make the decisions in conciliar bodies are not living in a world of lawyers, lobbyists, staffers, &c, but living around their neighbors and having to explain themselves to these neighbors. The more remote the legislator is, the more discretion is transferred to the permanent government the more policy comes to reflect the biases of professional guilds like NCATE. And, yes, local legislators (outside of a few loci like Chicago) generally make their real living doing something else.

    We cannot have government as localized as Switzerland, but we can do much better than we are toward that end. Needs some creative thinking.

  28. “… thus breeding a bastard child — a mandate that the teleological purpose of the federal government is to make America “more perfect,””

    Bingo! The perfect opening for the post-modern Gnostic worldview that humans can be perfected, and that it is the job of the progressive deity, that is the god of government to do it. #BakeTheCake! (or else).

    see:
    Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
    http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/hicks-ep-full.pdf

  29. Fourth, it is a multi-ethnic society whose people embrace their linguistic differences while maintaining their “Swiss” identity.

    A common self-understanding as Swiss antedated the development of national loyalties delimited by language in continental Europe. At the time Swiss identity was developing, people still tended to think in terms of fealty or attachment to localities or attachment to a confession. Popular speech was a local dialect or patois, not a national language. Upland areas in late Medieval and early modern Europe also tended to have quite different agricultural and hence social systems. In addition, people in Switzerland are commonly loyal to their canton.

  30. We have a long history of encouraging immigration when it is to the benefit of Already-Americans, and forbidding it when it is not. Pauses that were decades in length.

    Right now it is to the detriment of Already-Americans, yet our leaders are encouraging it anyway. Either they are addled, or they are working for someone else.

  31. “…Another major problem is that conservatives, mindful of protecting the reputation of the Republican Party, are unwilling to tell the truth about the GOP’s actual history. …”

    I have started asking people who call themselves “conservative” what exactly they want to conserve. For example, do they relish in our government’s big military and the Law and Order State, that is so quick to throw pot smoking hippies in jail for a year but they detest the welfare state?

    Do they want Big Government to be able to outlaw what homosexuals do in private, but don’t want them outlawing the sex toys they like to use?

    In other words, do some conservatives like a Big Government when it does things they like? Or do they understand how dangerous government can be and that it must be kept as small as possible?

    Conserve Big Government or Conserve Liberty by having just enough government?

  34. Actually I’m not.

    You’d go a lot farther if you stopped using either/or logic.

    I showed you text supporting RS interpretation of a broader form of posterity from the Founders. At no point did I advocate uncontrolled and unregulated immigration.

  35. What I want to know is with all the EXISTING immigration law on the books, why the self-annoited elites push breaking the law and shielding people from the consequences?

    Why not change the law?

  41. I don’t know any conservative who gives a rip what gays do, nor who wants the government involved in it.

    And nobody is in jail in the US for having a dime bag. For what it’s worth, I’d be more than happy to see the War on Drugs ended, because the drugs won, at great cost to liberty. Incidentally, William F. Buckley supported decriminalizing pot too.

    Maybe if you knew more conservatives instead of the cartoon ones from Mother Jones you’d have a better understanding of what it means.

  42. 1. The legislative process is slow enough that each attempt nearly triggers an armed revolt before they finish.

    2. Their interests are served well by having a peonage of tens of millions that won’t appeal to the law for redress.

  45. That’s twice you’ve tried to make me the topic.

    I’m pretty sure the thread started with immigration. Then we took a brief sidebar into the Founder’s view of posterity.

    I’m not nearly as interesting.

  46. Good answers.

    I hope that normal people will notice that the “elites” have no respect for the rule of law and will sell out whoever and whatever they can to expand their power.

    But then, that’s what a politico does, isn’t it?

  48. Yup.

    Part of the problem is that leftists conflate ‘fiscons’ (fiscal conservatives) with ‘socons’ (social conservatives).

    Most of us are just happy if people don’t raise our taxes or piss on our lawns. We’re not picky. Gay? We don’t care. Wiccan? Hooray, move along. Day-glo hair? Hey, if your workplace allows it, bully for you.

  49. Friday morning links

    Monarch butterfly migration mystery solved Is Cremation a Pagan Practice Which Christians Should Avoid? Health update: Eat more chocolate And more animal fats… what next? This Is How to Confront Campus Crybabies Special Snowflakes Petit

  50. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1876 not 1776.

    Also, remember that most of those from the Classical Western Lands (as well as a number of Jewish people leaving the pogroms in most of “liberal” Europe), were looked down upon by the Nativists and the Protestant religious folks of the time. Even the so-called “Progressive wing” of GOP bought into that hysteria. That lead to the first version of the House of Un-American Activities Committee investigations. Where the HUAC was first looking for the possibility that this was an attempt by the Pope to create a theocracy via mass migration and the use of foreign languages (what are they speaking in Catholic Church during mass). Then it shifted to the Jews via the red scares and finally just after WW1 onto the cooky clans because someone caught on that the rebels were using the clan to spread seperationist ideals again as well as hate.

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