Time to Remove Socialist “Huddled Masses” Plaque from Statue of Liberty

With storied statues having come down from sea to shining sea the past year, it’s time for the same to happen with something somewhat newer: the socialist-born plaque in the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal...

The plaque contains the poem “The New Colossus,” written by socialist writer Emma Lazarus. It didn’t come with the statue, a gift from France unveiled in 1886, but was slapped on smack dab in the middle of the “Progressive Era” (in 1903). This was also the period that gave us other things as American as Lazarus’ poem, such as entry into WWI, the income tax and the notion that the Constitution could be considered a “living document” (Woodrow Wilson loved to bloviate about this). 

... What’s not so well known is that the Statue of Liberty had nothing to do with immigration. That the poem helps create the confusion that it does is enough of a reason to remove it, but there are others as well:

1. Many now see the poem’s most famous line, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” as a policy statement....

2. “The New Colossus” was an example of 19th-century virtue signaling.... Lazarus could be seen as having been an (unwitting) enemy of America....

3. Today, the huddled masses aren’t yearning to breathe free; they’re yearning for free stuff. Immigration ain’t what it used to be...

4. Created by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the Statue of Liberty was originally intended to symbolize the principles of international republicanism; again, it had nothing to do with immigration....

This is especially true because the huddled-masses bit now buttresses what I dubbed immigrationism, the bizarre notion that immigration is always good... Yet with 85 to 90 percent of today’s immigrants hailing from the Third World and 70 to 90 percent of them voting for freedom-squelching Democrats upon naturalization, there’s an irony here: The phenomenon now represented by the Statue of Liberty is destroying liberty.

This, of course, is why leftists love today’s immigration....

... In fact, 21 years after Lazarus’ poem was placed on the statue, immigration was severely restricted via the enactment of the National Origins Act in 1924. Back then our population was only 114 million, mind you.

Now, having almost tripled, it’s 327 million — and counting.

And with our stable fertility rate, it only grows because of immigration. When will we say enough is enough? When our population is 400 million? A half-billion? One billion?...

Statue of Liberty - Liberty Enlightening the World, CAIRCO research.

The Statue of Liberty stands firm on liberty, not a poem, enlightening the world, CAIRCO.

Statue of Liberty Declares: STOP IMMIGRATION!, by Tim Murray, April 2, 2019.