AI-generated with Grok
One hundred and forty years ago today, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor. It remains one of the most recognizable symbols of American freedom in the world. However, it has also become one of the most misquoted and most misused.
You’ll often hear open borders or mass migration advocates reach for the same lines from Emma Lazarus' poem The New Colossus: “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” They treat the poem as if it’s a federal immigration mandate carved in stone, but they are often wrong about what the poem means and the Statue of Liberty represents.
The left consistently misreads Emma Lazarus’ central argument. The opening lines — “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp” — are always cut. Without them, the contrast at the heart of the poem is lost. Lazarus was not writing an obligation for America to absorb the world. She was writing a rebuke to European aristocracies for dismissing as wretched refuse those who had come to America and built something Europe could not. The poem's point was that free societies succeed and tyrannies fail. The people who use it today to argue for unlimited immigration take Europe's side of the argument.
And here is why that matters beyond poetry and statues. Security analyst J. Michael Waller has documented what history obviously shows— that mass immigration has been weaponized as a tool of unconventional warfare for three thousand years, from the Neo-Assyrian Empire through the Soviet Comintern to Castro's Mariel Boatlift, which deliberately emptied Cuban prisons into the United States. Fidel Castro's protégé Nicolas Maduro did the same with Venezuelan prisons decades later, dispatching Tren de Aragua street gangs as part of the flow. The Muslim Brotherhood's own 1991 planning document calls its strategy civilization jihad — the systematic colonization of Western nations from within, destroying them by their own hands and the hands of the believers.
During the Biden years, an estimated sixty thousand military-age men from Communist China crossed the southern border. That’s the equivalent of six Army divisions.
Emma Lazarus believed that free societies produced free people. She was right. Her famous poetry is not arguing that America was obligated to absorb every person who could reach its shores regardless of intent or origin. The people who quote her poem while defending mass immigration have misread it from the beginning.
Stay informed and understand history at PhyllisSchlafly.com, and join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
