By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times
“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!”
These immortal lines of verse are inscribed inside the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor which has welcomed millions of immigrants to these United States since 1886.
In fact, most native-born American citizens can trace their ancestry back to someone who passed through Ellis Island. For example, my immigrant ancestors came from Germany and England and settled in Michigan and Kentucky.
Let’s pause at this point and get our definitions straight. Emigration is moving out of a country, while immigration is moving into a country. Persons in either category frequently are identified by the news media simply as migrants, usually as illegal or undocumented migrants.
The U.S. Supreme Court last week voted 7-2 to allow the Trump Administration to cancel the “temporary protected status” of more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and to deport them from this country.
Added to the 350,000 Venezuelans stripped of protection in an earlier case means nearly one million men, women and children can be expelled with no recourse.
Many of these individuals and families have been here for up to two years. They paid their way to America because of political or religious persecution, fear of violence, economic hardships and other scary conditions.
Wasn’t this the same scenario faced by the Puritans fleeing England and the Irish evading starvation in the potato famine and Jews from all over Europe trying to escape the Nazi death camps?
Those groups and many others found refuge in our land of the free and home of the brave and helped build a great nation. But our country’s current federal leadership is preoccupied with trying to fulfill phony campaign promises based on grossly inflated numbers of suspected illegal immigrants.
At this point, the only potential immigrants welcomed by the new folks in Washington are affluent white “refugees” from South Africa.
Doesn’t that mean we have become a nation led by white supremists? Our president has proposed selling some of our national parks. We might as well throw in Lady Liberty since she really doesn’t mean anything now.
Contact Keith at keithkappes@gmail.com.
