by John Indermark
In case you were wondering: the title is not mistaken in its gender pronoun usage. I do not have in mind the Lazarus, beloved brother of Mary and Martha, who already experienced rolling out of his grave according to John’s gospel. No, the Lazarus I have in mind is Emma, beloved daughter of Moses and Esther – and the poet who penned the words engraved on a bronze plaque that now (at least for the time being) stands displayed in the museum at the Statue of Liberty. Its closing words, taken from a longer poem of hers, would once have been the stuff of Fourth of July picnics and elementary school recitations and civics classes.
“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 say “once would have been” because some Very Important People in Very High Places have definite ideas about who should be let in and particularly who should be kept out of our nation these days, ideas that seem to take a sand blaster to Lazarus’ inscription. The most recent rule put forth by the Trump administration regarding immigration reinterprets provisions of “public charge” in Draconian ways – or, given its likely architect, Millerian ways. Mind you, the rule aims not at illegal immigrants, but LEGAL immigrants. If you need most any form of public assistance to help get your feet on the ground, fugetaboutit. All such objections go away, of course, according to the fine print of the rule, if you can show your income is 250% or more of the federal poverty line. If it is, c’mon in! If it’s not, maybe the deportation venues will at least have the honesty to play Ray Charles (“Hit the Road, Jack, and don’t you come back . . .”). And perhaps the National Park Service will be directed by Mr. Miller to update Emma’s plaque:
Give me your hired, your secure,
Your globe-trotting investors yearning to be regulation-free,
The targeted folk of north European shores,
Send these, the classy, upper-crust to me.
As I said, Lazarus must be rolling over in her grave, and not just because of the words of her poem with which we are most familiar. Did you know the title she gives to the Statue in the poem is not Lady Liberty, but Mother of Exiles? What would she say to those who seek asylum today, driven by violence and despair literally into exiles – only to be met with pejoratives of “murderers” and “rapists?” I believe Emma’s answer can be discerned in the phrase she used in the poem: “From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome.”
Today, in addressing the new rule, the administration’s Director of Immigration Services was asked how this policy set with the Statue’s invitation to “your tired, your poor, your, huddled masses.” His answer? “I’m certainly not prepared to take anything down off the Statue of Liberty. We have a long history of being one of the most welcoming nations in the world.”
Unfortunately, history is no guarantor of the future, and befogged nostalgia can be the future’s worst enemy. The question is: Are we NOW to be who we advertise ourselves to be? Hypocrisy is not a problem limited to the church. It gnaws away at national identities. If this rule stands, Lazarus’ poem and its “Mother of Exiles” will cease to be our aspiration –and be transformed into our self-inflicted indictment of nativism and greed.