Sunday Reflection: The Wretched Refuse

"From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “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-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

-- Emma Lazarus, 7/22/1849 - 11/19/1887, excerpted from her poem "The New Colossus" (1883), written in tribute to the Statue of Liberty (Lazarus' "Mother of Exiles") and to raise funds to build its pedestal. Sixteen years after her death, her poem was inscribed on a plaque placed on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal.

Lazarus was a poet, translator and social activist who fought against rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States. She was an early feminist and a supporter of the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York that provided vocational education to immigrants. Her words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal are nearly as famous as the statue itself, and a reminder of how we once welcomed immigrants, rather than demonized them for far-right political purposes.