If the vast majority of your fellow Americans, Max, feel so strongly about rejecting children of all ages coming from hellholes in South America, seeking refuge in this nation, let me suggest that it is time for your country to show its real face rather than exhibiting on Ellis Island :...
The vast majority of those "fellow" Americans have strong, and at times conflicted, feelings about what to do with Obama's pied piper call for millions of citizens of Latin America to assail the Republic's borders, as they do about the Honduran and Mexican governments that promoted and eased transport to the US borders to make it our problem.
I wonder what the vast majority to Mexicans feel, if they thought the US could have turned them back or how Canadians might feel if like Mexico we cynically passed them forward to Canada? Why you choose selective criticism of US citizens who seek to impose serious border control with merit based immigration, as have many "progressive" countries, remains curious. How, one wonders, is it that the billions of children in the hell holes of Africa or Asia not embraced by the citizens of France, Germany, the UK, or Italy. And how about Canada, Australia, or New Zealand?
Finally, I have no difficulty in considering the New Colossus as reflective of an honored historical experience, just as I do for other inscriptions and monuments. But such sentiments were appropriate for a different time and purpose, one that even at the time they were expressed was beginning to fray.
America was born in revolution, both as a confirmation of a new people and as a bold promise of liberty and republican self rule - it loudly denounced the old world caste and demanded the severing of roots to the blood feuds and clans of Europe. It though of itself as a "City on a Hill" a promise to all men who sought freedom. The theme of America prior to the turn of the century was not complicated, America was a new land (with a wilderness 'to tame') populated by a "new race of men", a "new compound", with an ideological mission - anyone willing to leave clans behind, to shed old identity, to become reborn into Americans (defined as anyone who believed in liberty, Republicanism, and the Constitution) were welcome to join and seek their own fortune.
There were, of course, some good and not so good reasons to encourage immigration. The most important, in the 19th century, was the settlement of the West (everything beyond Appalachia). Millions of people came, turning prairie into plowed fields and ranches, and river intersections into towns and cities. Into the 20th century there was a general consensus among those who supported such immigration: America promises only liberty and opportunity to those willing to embrace its values and civic religion. It was not enough to come without expectations of a publicly funded welfare system. One was also expected to 'be American' to embrace liberty and self-rule as the very meaning of being an American.
And until the closing of the frontier in 1890, it made some sense. “The frontier,” wrote Frederick Jackson Turner, “promoted the formation of a composite nationality.… In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.” In the crucible of the cities too assimilation proceeded apace. Even “the Irish immigrant’s son,” Bryce reported in 1888, “is an American citizen for all other purposes, even if he retain, which he seldom does, the hereditary Anglophobia.”
That, of course, began to change in the early 20th century. Americans did not assimilate quite as fast as they had, as people's from Southern and Eastern Europe, and Russian Jews, filled urban centers. The new polyglot immigration, two decades of labor violence, organized crime, and its white ethnic clannishness fueled backlash movements, as well as movements to expedite assimilation by offering immigrants special education in language, citizenship, and American history. It even worried immigration supporters, such as Woodrow Wilson, who lectured the newly naturalized “You cannot become thorough Americans ,” he told them, “if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.” “We can have no ‘fifty-fifty’ allegiance in this country,” Theodore Roosevelt said two years later. “Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.
Then, as we know the US wisely clamped down on immigration. And until 1965, it was a settled issue. The country was 150,000,000. We didn't need immigration that repeated the painful experience of the turn of the century. We didn't need people who go on the dole, get subsided medical care, turn our farmland into apartment complexes, congest our freeways, and who will create an forever unhappy and violent underclass. We didn't need 310,000,000.
The country has already more than doubled in 50 years, and it is not in the interests of our children or grand children to live in an America that has doubled again in the next 50 years.
