Lady Liberty turns 125: Does she still want our “tired and poor” after all these years?
The Statue of Liberty has greeted visitors and migrants to the United States for 125 years. (Getty Images)
By JUAN GASTELUM
Channel: Immigration
For 125 years, the Statue of Liberty has gazed over New York Harbor — an imposing and impressive tribute to independence, democracy, and the end of slavery in America.
But its location next to Ellis Island, the nation’s first federally operated immigration station, and the main point of entry for millions of immigrants during the first part of the 20th Century, enhanced the statue’s symbolism beyond what its creators originally imagined.
Throughout the world and within our borders, the Statue of Liberty is widely revered as the embodiment of the U.S.’s willingness to take in and integrate people from around the globe.
More recently, however, anti-immigrant attitudes have pervaded the national conversation on immigration.
The federal government has beefed up enforcement without any significant progress on legislation to deal with more than 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country. Existing visa programs to enter the country legally are cumbersome and can take years to navigate. Some states are passing laws meant to drive immigrants out, and sealing the border has become the country’s obsession, with comments of building moats and electric fences to boot.
Those attitudes may be the result of a slumping economy, fear of threats to national security, or hesitancy to accept the ever-growing minorities populations that change the country’s ethnic make-up. But whatever the case, the message the country is sending to the world has dramatically changed.
On this anniversary, it is imperative that we decide what that message should be. Will our generation’s attitude toward immigration be best represented, as it has for generations, by the welcoming lady asking the world for their tired and poor? Or will it be a stifling barrier running across the southwest border?
