“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shores.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Whack! Off with her head!! Seems Der Spiegel over in Germany was right all along about President Donald Trump. Right after the 2016 election, the European news journal ran a cover cartoon depiction of Trump: holding in one hand a bloody sword while the other held up the bleeding head of the Statue of Liberty. The revolting editorial cartoon, in color for the macabre, was supposed to be political satire based on Trump’s agenda if and when elected U.S. president. His first order of business was to stop immigration (soft-pedaled as illegal immigration). The Statue of Liberty has long been a world renowned symbol of America’s embrace of immigrants regardless of nationality, race, ethnicity or religion.
And now President Trump’s plan to halt immigration, specifically of Latin Americans, is coming to fruition right after the 2018 midterm election. He and he alone ordered the U.S. military to protect the border. There are two conflicts with the presidential order. One is illegal immigration, already handled by federal border patrol agents. Then there is the issue of asylum.
Any former American school student must find it hard to believe the United States will no longer provide asylum to Latin American refugees, whether they walked a thousand miles in a massive crowd or crossed the border as a family with children. Border patrol agents know what to do when catching and apprehending anyone illegally crossing the border. If individuals claim asylum, they are allowed temporary entrance into the U.S. but must wait for federal immigration courts to hear their plea, often just the immigrant’s word based on personal experience without documentation such as photos and cell phone videos of rapes and gang shootings or recorded threats against their lives. The Hondurans heading north reportedly to America have claimed their lives are in danger, meaning they would certainly be tortured and/or killed if they remained in their homeland … which is where they’d rather live, don’t you think?
Home is where the heart is
Political and religious asylum has been a human right long recognized and respected by the U.S. probably because ours is a nation of immigrants, people whose lineage is not originally from this part of the world. The majority of us can check our family history online nowadays and find when our roots were firmly planted in the soil of America, once called the New World by Europeans of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras.
In the digital age of the 21st century, the power in charge says Americans have had enough of foreigners migrating to our shores. Why do they keep coming here when they know Americans will resent and suppress them? When they know we’ll keep them poor, yell at ’em to speak English, and refuse to get to know them or help in any way other than begrudgingly with our hard-earned tax dollars? Hmm. Money is always the initial prejudice.
According to the U.S. budget breakdown, the biggest slice of the pie goes to support the military, then another big chunk goes to Medicare (the elderly who paid into it during their working years), and so on until finally a tiny sliver is left to assist legal immigrants with low-income housing, some foodstuffs, very basic healthcare (Medicaid) and enforced public schooling.
The poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty had it right all along: Most immigrants who come to this country—like most of our ancestors—are poor not rich, hardly living a life of privilege off U.S. taxpayers. And immigrants stay poor for at least one generation. Most immigrants to this country are good conscientious people, folks just wanting to survive and yes prosper, actually begging for what they believed was a natural God-given human right to be free from persecution. They are willing to do anything, work any job, accept the lowest wage, reside in high-crime areas, put up with taunts and jeers coming from the top of our political power structure and supported wholeheartedly by the loudest of Americans—people who’ve forgotten their heritage, their family’s journey not all that long ago. What a shame.
To be poor and also an immigrant is to be liberal, meaning open minded to other ways of living and thinking. Right there is the core issue irritating the heart of Americans who do not believe their tax dollars and our nation should support immigrants for any reason whatsoever. Immigrants, legal or illegal, have never been our country’s Number One problem, likened to an infestation of cockroaches that must be exterminated.
Immigrants to America do not deserve to be kicked in the gut by steel boots and scorned with hateful rhetoric and general meanness. And if we’re really being honest, immigrants seeking asylum, from homelands dominated by violent crazy narco governments, do not have in their numbers the thousands of native-born American rapists and criminal sociopaths who daily terrorize citizens until stopped by police. The sociopaths of narco governments remain behind in the countries they dominate. For life is good, why would they ever leave?
Meanwhile in New York Harbor, modern Americans can tear down the plaque at the foot of Lady Liberty or redact the poetic words once symbolizing the golden purpose of our country’s beautiful and just existence. But those very words and the profound meaning will not be ignored or forgotten by millions of Americans and neither will our consecrated assurance in the sanctity of humanity. We’re all just human beings down here, trying to stay alive, walking toward the light of liberty wherever we find it near or far. Like it or not, we all are equal to each other, maybe not in the eyes of the races but in the eyes of our Creator, the One we each answer to one way or another.