“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!”

• (From The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus … also known as the Statue of Liberty poem

Political venom against immigrants betrays the principles of our nation!!!!

By Joseph Batory

The repetitive rhetoric of too many right-wing politicians and their empty-headed media machines these days is  filled with venomous  messages such as:  “These immigrants are all drug pushers and terrorists and criminals and must be stopped. And they will take our jobs!” 

And so, thousands of immigrants running from dictators, drug lords, rampant crime, intense poverty,  and violence in their home countries are now being denied asylum and have been detained at our borders.

Unfortunately, bigots and narrow-minded elitists have always been part of the American landscape distorting the need for humanitarian caring and outreach with misinformation and   fabrications. Over the years, they have exploited  the fears of a naïve public. Just a few examples are below:

• About waves of Irish immigrants in the 19^th century: “Worthless people. Put them all on boats and send them back to where they came from.”
• About Italian immigrants at the beginning of the 20^th century: “Lazy do-nothings, they are all violent assassins by nature, criminals and often terrorists.”:
• About Chinese immigrants for many decades in the 20^th century until the Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1942: “These yellow people are inferior with strange customs and practices and are not worthy to become Americans.”

And now,  this kind of vitriolic propaganda against new waves of immigrants is repeating itself here in the USA!  We are told repeatedly by misguided  politicians and their fabrication machines that immigrants are evil and must be sent back where they came from.

This concept of exclusion represents America at its worst!  As a horrid example ,  at the outbreak of WW II, the United States Government refused to allow thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing the Nazi menace to find refuge in our country. The American people were told that “these Jewish immigrants were a threat to national security defining these refugees as spies and potential criminals who would take American jobs.”

In 1940, a State Department memo directed USA consulates worldwide to “put obstacles in the way…postpone and postpone and postpone granting entry visas to these Jewish refugees.” As a result, many USA consulates essentially issued “death sentences” to these immigrants who were denied asylum and forced to return where they started.

In summary, the idea of people desperately seeking a new life here is hardly something new to our nation. Many millions of people have come here hoping for a better future and achieved success. As for the present, there are certainly better ways to handle illegal immigrants rather than breaking up families, incarcerating hopeless people, or deporting individuals back into violent war zones or to the political turmoil or the extreme poverty situations from which they fled.

It is true that many desperate immigrants have crossed the US border illegally. But has this really created a disaster?  It is indeed ironic here if 2024, contrary to this anti-immigration propaganda, that a senior economist from the Federal Reserve Bank and an array of other researchers have posited the reality that the recent immigration wave has been a key factor in  driving the current upward growth of the US economy.

The mass of immigrants trying to enter the USA these days  is a complex matter with no easy answers.  But less negativism and more strategic thinking and much better planning by our government are what is needed now. Political posturing rather than a quest for  solutions will solve nothing. American can and must do better on this issue.

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Joseph Batory is the author of three books and nearly 300 published articles on politics, history, and education.