“On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?” Thus queried Michelle Alexander in Friday’s New York Times, making it quite clear this was rhetorical question:
We are the only nation that advertises itself as “a nation of immigrants” and the “land of the free,” an advertising campaign complete with a Statute of Liberty whose pedestal includes a plaque of a poem that reads in part:
“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!”
Alexander cites these words in indictment of the “moral quagmire . . . we’ve created by treating the migration of desperately poor people as a problem that can best be addressed by border walls, tear gas, detention camps, militarized policing, and mass deportation”—with one exception, all policies that were pursued under both the Trump and Obama Administrations.
And yes, Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet does “in part” read like a rally cry against such things—but only because Alexander omits the other parts that don’t. Here’s the poem’s full text, absent the usual truncating:
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!” [Emphasis added.]
As Peter Skerry has explained, Mother of Exiles refers specifically to “victims of anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia”—people who would be considered refugees under current international law. Hence the diasporic language—”refuse,” “homeless”—of Lazarus’s closing peroration: The “ancient lands” she is addressing have already forced some subset of their inhabitants to leave.
By contrast, most undocumented aliens today are migrants who “move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives. . . . Unlike refugees who cannot safely return home, migrants face no such impediment to return.” Alexander conflates these groups, implying that there is no moral basis for denying anyone—refugee or immigrant—the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship. But even on Alexander’s cherry-picked evidence, it seems Lady Liberty would beg to differ. Not just because she’s the mother of exiles as opposed to the mother of humanity; not just because she’s welcoming the “wretched,” the “homeless,” the “tempest-tost,” all of whom have special need for a sanctuary; not just because she’s standing besides (checks notes) a literal golden door, which can be opened and closed at will.
No, the main reason this op-ed is incoherent is that it invokes the horrors of statelessness to make what is at core an anti-statist argument. Refugees come into being precisely because they are denied state protection—in the most extreme cases, because they are denied citizenship itself. To be sure, none of the world’s displaced persons ever “earned” the rights, privileges, and opportunities that were eventually taken away from them. Rather, as Alexander puts it, “all of us—no matter where we were born—deserve compassion and basic human rights.” True: But these rights do not float free of existing customs and circumstance; they inhere in particular societies with particular limits—spatial, numerical, cultural—and it is ultimately limits that allow rights to be enforced, compassion to be cultivated.
Thus when Alexander questions the case for limited citizenship (“how can we deny other people something we did not earn ourselves?’), she is really questioning the foundation of everything she claims to value. Financially, open borders would strain our safety net and induce Hobbesian competition within the labor market. Politically, they would polarize our democracy and make efficient governance impossible. And culturally, they would erode the moral consensus and civic fellow-feeling on which our nation, and indeed all nations, depend.
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States . . . with all of those benefits,” President Trump fumed in October. “It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.” On this, he and Alexander agree.
