On this date in 1886, President Grover Cleveland stood in front of the newly completed Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The gift from France was a decade late, intended for the 1876 centennial of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 written on her tablet.
Her symbolism, complete with a broken shackle and chain at her feet naked, was meant to celebrate American independence and the end of slavery after the Civil War, but being at the main port of entry for immigrants, and a poem by Emma Lazarus to help raise money to pay for her pedestal, she would become a monument to this country’s innate immigrant nature. More than a century later, that notion finds little defense in the mainstream political discourse.
Democrats campaigning for Congress run TV ads promising to shut down the border, sounding like anti-immigration Republicans, who denigrate newcomers.
Kamala Harris has mainly emphasized that she’d be tough on immigrants, channeling what she believes to be the zeitgeist. Yet that doesn’t begin to approach the cruelty of Donald Trump’s plan of deporting 20 million people — far more than even the most expansive estimates of the nation’s undocumented population. We might as well take down Lady Liberty if this comes to pass, though there likely won’t be any crews left to actually do it.
These plans — an absolute national economic, cultural and civic mistake that perhaps would be the most disastrous decision of the post-Civil War United States — are often hand-waved away as bluster or campaign talk. He can’t really do it, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t manage. Yet just a few years ago, the idea that the Supreme Court would actually overturn Roe v. Wade was considered far-fetched. We know how that panned out.
If the candidates won’t speak for immigrants, we will. The country needs immigrants and not just big cities like New York. Springfield, Ohio, where thousands of Haitians have legally settled, is seeing the newcomers inject energy into the economy. People come here to work and make their fortune.
Imagine the most motivated people from all over the world, willing to pick up their lives and their families and move thousands of miles to another place with perhaps another language. Those are the folks with moxie, the drive to succeed that fuels this country.
The truth is that the immigration that came through under Lady Liberty’s gaze is more than a feel-good story. Without it, the United States would not have achieved its economic, cultural and political global primacy, full stop.
Both of Harris’ parents were immigrants (from India and Jamaica), as was Trump’s mother (from Scotland) and two of his three wives (from Czechoslovakia and Slovenia). Among his most prominent boosters is immigrant Elon Musk (from South Africa) a man who admitted to personally having a “gray area” immigration status after his own brother called them “illegal immigrants” in the 1990s.
The fact is we need immigrants, very badly. We cannot kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and destroy everything this country stands for in the process. We need more political figures to make the forceful case in favor of immigration, before it’s too late.
Today is Lady Liberty’s 138th birthday. We need to keep open the Golden Door.
