Remember, Liberty embraces diversity
In 280 B.C., the ancient Greeks built a giant statue on the Island of Rhodes celebrating the island’s defeat of an attempted invasion by Cyprus. At 108 feet tall, The Colossus was the tallest statue of the day and is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It stood watch over the main harbor of Rhodes, its purpose to intimidate and repel any future invaders ....
Many years later a similar, equally impressive statue was built in a different land. This statue also stood 108 feet tall and overlooked a harbor. What made it different was its purpose, its message to the outside world.
A poet at the time was inspired to write a poem about this statue.
Appropriately, the poem is called The New Colossus:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. 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!”
The American poet, Emma Lazarus, wrote these words in 1883 more than 2,000 years after the original Colossus was built to protect Rhodes from outsiders.
What Emma Lazarus recognized was that America’s promise was different than Rhodes’. The Statue of Liberty broadcasts a message of opportunity to the world.
When we hear the words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” we usually think that these words are about the opportunity America offers to those seeking a better life in America.
While it is true that America has provided opportunity to millions of immigrants and refugees from around the world, the poem makes a more important point about opportunity in America.
As Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, has pointed out, America didn’t say something like “Because we are a good and generous country, we will consider accepting you and provide you with opportunity, or at least some of you, given our resources are limited.”
No, America said something different. We said affirmatively and unequivocally, Give me your poor! Give me your homeless! Give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!
Why did we say so strongly, so positively, so unequivocally, “Give me your poor”? Because America wanted them. It wasn’t a matter of if we were willing to take in the poor, willing to give them opportunity. No, we wanted them because of the opportunity they offered to America.
We knew the poor, the homeless, the dispossessed were so hungry for a better future, so hungry for freedom that they would work hard to build America’s future. In fact, more than 40 percent of the Fortune 500 companies in 2010 were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant.
Unlike other countries, America chose not to fight over a stagnant pond of scarcity. Instead, America embraced a belief that people from all walks of life could work together to create a flowing river of abundance.
This belief that we can all work together to create a country where all people can have the opportunity to earn their own success is at the heart of America’s exceptionalism. It is this belief for which our founding fathers fought, for which so many Americans have died defending, and for which the Statue of Liberty’s torch stands over America’s harbor proclaiming our vision to the world. It is up to us to keep that flame alive.