The young woman had just sat down at her corner kitchen table with a cup of freshly brewed coffee, her laptop open to the New York Times, when someone began banging frantically at the door to her apartment.
This piece too reminds me of a Ray Bradbury story that he wrote many years ago titled, "I See You Never," which relected what was going on in Los Angeles at the time. What is going on now is not new. It happened in Germany as well after Hitler came into power.
ICE wearing masks is chilling. I wrote to Joe Biden about changing the name of ICE back to INS, which meant Immigration Naturalization Service, because immigration shouldn't be looked at like it's a crime, but rather a service.
"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-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, from "The New Colossus"
Lazarus reconsidered and wrote the sonnet, “The New Colossus.” The opening of the poem refers to the Colossus of Rhodes, an ancient statue of a Greek titan. But Lazarus then refers to the statue which “shall” stand as a “mighty woman with a torch” and the “Mother of Exiles.”
Over the following decades, especially in the 1920s, when the United States began to restrict immigration, the words of Lazarus took on deeper meaning. And whenever there is talk of closing America's borders, relevant lines from "The New Colossus" are always quoted in opposition.
Still, the poem and its connection to the statue unexpectedly became a contentious issue in the summer of 2017. Stephen Miller, an anti-immigrant adviser to President Donald Trump, sought to denigrate the poem and its connection to the statue.
Two years later, in the summer of 2019, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Trump administration, sparked a controversy by suggesting that the classic poem be edited. In a series of interviews on August 13, 2019, Cuccinelli said the poem should be changed to refer to immigrants who "can stand on their own two feet." He also noted that the Lazarus poem referred to "people coming from Europe," which critics interpreted as a sign of current bias toward non-white immigrants.
By Robert McNamara
Robert J. McNamara is a history expert and former magazine journalist. He was Amazon.com's first-ever history editor and has bylines in New York, the Chicago Tribune, and other national outlets.
This piece too reminds me of a Ray Bradbury story that he wrote many years ago titled, "I See You Never," which relected what was going on in Los Angeles at the time. What is going on now is not new. It happened in Germany as well after Hitler came into power.
ICE wearing masks is chilling. I wrote to Joe Biden about changing the name of ICE back to INS, which meant Immigration Naturalization Service, because immigration shouldn't be looked at like it's a crime, but rather a service.
"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-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, from "The New Colossus"
Lazarus reconsidered and wrote the sonnet, “The New Colossus.” The opening of the poem refers to the Colossus of Rhodes, an ancient statue of a Greek titan. But Lazarus then refers to the statue which “shall” stand as a “mighty woman with a torch” and the “Mother of Exiles.”
Over the following decades, especially in the 1920s, when the United States began to restrict immigration, the words of Lazarus took on deeper meaning. And whenever there is talk of closing America's borders, relevant lines from "The New Colossus" are always quoted in opposition.
Still, the poem and its connection to the statue unexpectedly became a contentious issue in the summer of 2017. Stephen Miller, an anti-immigrant adviser to President Donald Trump, sought to denigrate the poem and its connection to the statue.
Two years later, in the summer of 2019, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Trump administration, sparked a controversy by suggesting that the classic poem be edited. In a series of interviews on August 13, 2019, Cuccinelli said the poem should be changed to refer to immigrants who "can stand on their own two feet." He also noted that the Lazarus poem referred to "people coming from Europe," which critics interpreted as a sign of current bias toward non-white immigrants.
By Robert McNamara
Robert J. McNamara is a history expert and former magazine journalist. He was Amazon.com's first-ever history editor and has bylines in New York, the Chicago Tribune, and other national outlets.
August 14, 2019