Give us 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 shore.
My wife just sung this to me from memory (1960 Concert Choir I, Monrovia HS)
Maybe America could use an infusion of freedom-loving people, since the natives don't seem to care any more.
My grandfather came here late in the 19th Century, his twin brother was not allowed in because he was sick. He never was seen again by his family. So the huddled masses used to have to be healthy, able to support themselves fully, or supported by a family member, or a sponsor, and wait in line!!!!!!!. Now we take all the sick, all of the poor, and give the huddled masses everything for free.
I've got one related to this.
During the time which Haitians were coming by the boatloads to the U.S., they would be rescued by U.S. Coast Guard ships. Once safely on board they would be assigned to a portion of the deck during their trip back to Haiti.
A young Coast Guard Ensign told me that the men would have sex with the pregnant women hoping that they would give birth right there on deck. Seems that they believed, rightly or wrongly that if they gave birth on ship their child would be a citizen and have certain inalienable rights.
Is this correct that their offspring would be citizens? This is a true story.
The inscription on the bottom of Liberty is comprised of just the last five lines from Lazarus’ poem ‘The New Colossus.’ The line before ‘Give me your tired, your poor....’ reads: ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she with silent lips.’
At the time the poem was written (early 1880’s), Lazarus was expressing the belief that America was not interested in becoming yet another aristocracy – that the liberty which was guaranteed within her borders served as a beacon for those who were mercilessly chained to lower-class existences in other cultures.
Those were indeed the ‘good old days’. The time in America before leftists took the helm and succeeded in turning (as is always their style) good and noble ideas inside out.
What should have been (and probably was, in the late nineteenth century) implicit in those words was the idea that that ‘wretched refuse’....those ‘huddled masses’....would simply be afforded equality of opportunity. In America 2002, what is offered is equality of benefit, without equivalent input -- i.e., a free lunch on the backs of (dare I say?) real Americans. (Get out the p.c. paintbrush and paint me intolerant! :)
There are many obscene results of this open door citizenship policy – one of the most obvious of which is that, in California (where there is a high concentration of such convenient births) forty-eight percent of all Medi-Cal funded births are for alien mothers – not to mention the billions spent in welfare in order to house and feed their children. So, not only are the taxpayers of this country being bled dry in order to educate, house and feed the children of illegal aliens, but the taxpayers of the various states in which the alien birth rate is highest are being forced to pay for the births themselves.
Both Great Britain and Australia repealed their U.S. style citizenship by birth policy in the 1980s after enduring such abuses long enough.
The Fourteenth Amendment stipulates that Congress has the power to enforce its provisions via legislation. And the power to enforce a law goes hand-in-hand with the authority to interpret that law. So....an act of Congress stating that the umbrella of the Fourteenth Amendment does not include the offspring of illegal aliens would fall within Congress's prerogative. But, as usual, any such bill that has ever been brought before Congress (and there have been several in the last four or five years) has either died in committee or on the floor.
A misery loves company aside: We aren’t alone in our stupidity. I received a letter from a British friend of mine just today (we have been ‘penpals’ since the age of ten). Here’s a depressing excerpt:
A friend was having a BBQ party for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. I haven’t seen so many flags being flown since the Silver Jubilee. It’s frowned upon to fly the flag over here, because it tends to upset the ethnic minorities. At one stage, people were being fired or told to take them down until there was an uproar in the papers. It’s really a sad thing when you are not allowed to feel proud of your country and your flag.
It would appear that cow towing to ‘ethnic minorities’ is part of the peculiar genetic makeup of once proud and rational Anglo-Saxon cultures (gone awry).