"No Longer Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Breath Free"
There once was a time when every school child could identify the term “Mayflower” - the name of the first ship to arrive in the New World. To be the descendant of a Mayflower family meant that one was a “blue-blood.” The roster of passengers on that famous 1620 voyage contained names like Alden, Allerton, Bradford, Carter, Mullins, and Priest; Standish, Story, Wilder, Williams and Winslow. Among their descendants across many generations we find such famous (and infamous) people as Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Poet Robert Frost, the late Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, Barbara Bush, Helen Keller, Humphrey Bogart and even the Wright Brothers, Sarah Palin, Jane Fonda and John Hinckley, Jr. Without question, the original passenger list of the Mayflower consists of some of the most successful families in American history. And although, as legend would have it, most came here in search of religious freedom, the truth is that just as many arrived on these shores looking for lower taxes and greater wealth. I well remember a cartoon which adorned a wall in my cubbyhole of an office when I worked as “environmental ethicist” for California Governor Jerry Brown back in the mid-1970’s: Two pilgrims were standing on the bowsprit of the Mayflower. One said to the other: “Religious freedom is a great thing, but I came here to get into real estate!” Whatever the case, to be part of the “Mayflower generation” has long marked one as a member of America’s aristocracy.
Not so well known was a ship that arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan on September 22, 1654. It was called the “Ste Catherine,” which had embarked from Recife, Brazil months earlier and has ever since been known as “The Jewish Mayflower.” The vast majority of its passengers were Sephardi - Jews whose ancestry could be traced to Spain and Portugal. Non speakers of Yiddish, their native tongue was mostly Ladino (a linguistic blend of Spanish and Hebrew) or Judismo (sometimes referred to as “Judaeo-Arabic”). Among its passenger list were families named Gomez, Seixas, Nathan, Cardozo and Lazarus. One of the Cardozos - Benjamin [1870-1938] would become the second Jew to serve on the United States Supreme Court; another, Haym Salomon (1740-1785) was one of the two greatest financial backers of the American revolution); a third, Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) became one of early America’s most respected poets, and the author of the sonnet which adorns the base of the Statue of Liberty: The New Colossus, which reads in part:
"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!
For generations, immigrants to these shores - including, I would imagine - the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of many readers of this blog, entered the United States through New York Harbor . . . and this poem, sitting at the base of the “Lady With the Lamp,” was the first thing they saw . . . a message of heartfelt welcome. My wife Annie, although she and her parents arrived at Kennedy Airport rather than Ellis Island when they came here from Argentina a half-century ago, were well aware of the welcoming arms which awaited them. Both sides of my family - with a single exception (Grandpa Doc) came in through either Charleston or Baltimore harbor long before “Lady Liberty” had been created by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, built by Gustav Eiffel, and given a permanent home on Liberty Island. Nonetheless, their arrivals - around the time of America’s Civil War - were met with overwhelming optimism and pride . . . and the certain knowledge that at last they had found a home where being Jewish was neither an obstacle nor an impediment. And so it has been for countless generations. America welcomed generations of Schimbergs, Greenbergs, Hymans, Kagans and Zamosces with open arms and the promise a peaceful, prideful and productive future.
And it’s largely because of that inviolate promise that both my mother and my wife have devoted their time and energy to introducing newcomers to the mysteries of the English language, Democracy and the American way of life. My mother – a long-time Midwesterner from Chicago, Kansas City and Hollywood - tutored a new generation of Russian-Jewish refugees back in the 1960s; she recently told me that one of her best teaching tools was “the good old Yellow Pages” (remember them?) My wife, an immigrant from Argentina who earned both a B.A. and M.A. in English as a Second Language, has spent decades serving as teacher and mentor to refugees and asylees from all over the world, teaching them not only English but how to shop, read maps and menus, vote, create a proper resume, find a job, and generally participate in civil society.
That is until just the other day . . .
This past Friday, the Trump administration announced an exorbitant increase in fees for some of the most common immigration procedures, including an 81% increase in the cost of U.S. citizenship for naturalization. It will also now charge asylum-seekers, which is an unprecedented move. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a final rule in the Federal Register that details the new cost for dozens of immigration and naturalization applications, a further change in immigration policy to curb legal immigration of low-income foreign nationals. In an accompanying press release announcing the drastic and unparalleled changes, USCIS claimed they were enacted to "ensure U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recovers its costs of services.” While it is true that unlike many government agencies USCIS is largely fee funded, the timing is more than suspicious. The last time the agency raised its fees (by a weighted 21%) was in late December, 2016 - the very last days of the Obama administration. Changes like these don’t happen overnight; they are, generally speaking, the product of months - if not years - of investigation. But to publish and make manifest such draconian raises (which will go into effect on October 2, 2020), seems suspiciously political. The Trump team based an entire presidential campaign on the issue of immigration, dumping refugees, potential asylees - the “huddled masses yearning to be free” - into a cauldron bearing the legend “Go back from where you came; you are nothing but job-stealing, drug-dealing murderers and rapists who are intent on nothing less than living off the federal government for the rest of your lives.” And while a majority of the American public never really bought into this Kafkaesque nightmare, there were enough to form a strong political base and buy into the “MAGA” master plan.’
For months now, immigrants, refugees “the wretched refuse of your teeming shores” have largely disappeared from both presidential press conferences and the nightly news. And for obvious reasons which can be summed up in just a couple of syllables: impeachment, pandemic, job-loss ‘law ‘n order’ and 'massive voter fraud.’ But now that the national election is a mere 3 months away, it’s a great time to rev back up the issue of immigration; to make sure the Trumpist base is back on board.
And, as mentioned above, the fee hikes are without question, punitive to the max. Here are just a few:
The fee to apply for U.S. citizenship through naturalization will increase from $640 to $1,160 if filed online, or $ 1,170 in paper filing.
Form I-881, Application for Suspension of Deportation. Current fee: $285. Final Fee: $1,810. Percentage change: 535%.
Form ▪ I-929, Petition for Qualifying Family Member of a U-1 Nonimmigrant (Victims of Criminal Activity). Current fee: $230. Final Fee: $1,485. Percentage change: 546%.
It should be noted in passing that one of the main reasons why USCIS is in such perilous budgetary straits is that the current administration has so clamped down on refugees and those seeking asylum that now there are far fewer people paying fees. Somewhat surprisingly, this issue has received little notice in the mainstream media. At the same time, Trump’s political base is well aware of the “final rule” and all it entails.
The Lady With the Lamp must be shedding tears at this turn of events. That which has long made the United States so successful and unique - its melange of newcomers from the four corners of the earth - has been unalterably changed. Oh sure, we’ve had bouts of anti-immigrant lunacy across the centuries; but now, it’s become both codified and made the central focus of an entire political movement. Shame on all those who have clothed themselves in the garments of cowardice and permitted it to happen.
In 1982, four years before the Statue' of Liberty’s centennial anniversary, President Ronald Reagan appointed Lee Iacocca, the Chairman of Chrysler Corporation, to head the Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Foundation. The Foundation was created to lead the private sector effort and raise the funds for the renovation and preservation of the Statue for its centennial in 1986. The Foundation worked with the National Park Service to plan, oversee, and implement this restoration. At the time, Lady Liberty was badly in need of repair; she was falling apart and begrimed with nearly a century’s worth of grime and slime. And yet, by the time of her centennial, she was back to being a gleaming shrine; a vivid exemplar of what makes America unique among the nations. At its unveiling in 1986, one of the things that people most remarked on was the pristine and hopeful idealism of the words at her base . . . the words of Emma Lazarus, seen here in her own hand:
“The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus
Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone
Copyright©1883 Emma Lazarus