[Bret L]

“A Bad Poem On An Old French Statue Is Not An Immigration Policy”

[James Fulford]

“A bad poem on an old French statue is not an immigration policy.” writes Kathy Shaidle. She’s linking to Mark Steyn and Brenda Walker on the subject of the Statue of Liberty and its famous Emma Lazarus poem. Mark Steyn was responding to something Mark Krikorian said

Much of the way we think about immigration today is shaped by the
experience of Irish coming here in the mid-19th century and Jews at
the turn of the 20th century. These two immigrants streams are the
only major ones that bear any resemblance to the poem’s “tired,”
“poor” and “huddled masses” fleeing for their lives, never to look
back. For sure, the Irish and Ashkenazim have had an outsized
influence on America, if no other reason than they helped shape the
character of the newly industrializing cities of the East Coast, but
their numbers are a small share of our nation’s historical immigration
flow. And yet too many open-borders folks see in every one of today’s
immigrants someone fleeing the Potato Famine or being chased out of
Anatevka by the Cossacks.

This doesn’t necessarily translate to a specific policy position.
You could, for instance, take from this insight the lesson that our
immigration policy needs to be more like that of the Persian Gulf
states, where large numbers of foreigners come and go to work but
aren’t incorporated into our society (I’ve argued against that view
here and elsewhere). Or you could conclude that we’ve outgrown the
mass-immigration phase of our nation’s development and it’s time to
move on. But in either case, we need to disenthrall ourselves from the
mythology of the Mother of Exiles.

I’ve written about the Statue of Liberty here, saying

“This whole thing is very strange. Imagine a hypothetical foreign
country with immigration problems explaining its policy this way: “We
used to have sensible immigration laws, but someone built this damn
statue.” You’d think they were mad.”

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2009/...ration-policy/