Extinguishing Liberty's Flame on Refugees

Emma Lazarus, who's proud and shinning words stand indelibly inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, would weep in sorrow and shame if she were with us today as an ever increasing number of our political "leaders" and citizens call for the United States to extinguish the flame of liberty on Middle Eastern refugees of war.
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The Statue of Liberty stands tall as cloud hover over it in New York on October 3, 2015. AFP PHOTO/JEWEL SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)
The Statue of Liberty stands tall as cloud hover over it in New York on October 3, 2015. AFP PHOTO/JEWEL SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

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, who's proud and shinning words stand indelibly inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, would weep in sorrow and shame if she were with us today as an ever increasing number of our political "leaders" and citizens call for the United States to extinguish the flame of liberty on Middle Eastern refugees of war.

Though all but possibly one of the suspected Paris terrorist bombers held European passports, and while the United States undertakes the most rigorous visa-granting vetting process in the world taking two years from beginning to end, the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, have called for a moratorium on the granting of U.S. visas. In addition, while they do not have the authority to override federal government policy by denying entry of verified refugees, over thirty state governors, all but one elected as Republicans, are attempting to eclipse the sun on refugees in their specific states.

Republican Alabama governor Robert Bentley was quite clear when he quipped: "We're not going to let them into the state of Alabama....And I will not place Alabamians at even the slightest, possible risk of an attack on our people" I would ask Bentley, how different are your words from the slogan from the Terminex Pest Exterminator TV commercial: "Not Here! Not Now! Not in my house!"

Governor Chris Christie, who is currently running for the presidency, made no exceptions to his locked-and-bolted-door policy:

"The fact is that we need appropriate vetting, and I don't think orphans under five are being, you know, should be admitted into the United States at this point. But you know, they have no family here. How are we going to care for these folks?"

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Not only does humanity forget, consciously and unconsciously, our history, as George Santayana stated so simply and elegantly, but we continually refuse even to consider Santayana's poignant and prophetic warning by our entering into a state of collective amnesia, which has deadly consequences.

Christie's words came forth from his mouth as echoes of the past. Though reverberating on the ear drums somewhat less bombastically - which for Christie is a major effort - than previous iterations spouted by others, his impact is no less consequential.

In the year 1939, for example, just before the breakout of war in Europe and prior to our country's entry, for some refugees, primarily those within Europe's Jewish communities, the exit door, though slammed tightly shut for the majority, contained a slight and brief open crack for some.

During that year, two legislators in the U.S. Congress, Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) and Representative Edith Rogers (R-MA) proposed an emergency bill, which, if passed, would have increased the immigration quoted by allowing an additional 20,000 Jewish children under the age of 14 (10,000 in 1939, and another 10,000 in 1940) from Nazi Germany to come to the United States. Though the bill was roundly supported by religious and labor organizations, conservative and isolationist groups mounted wide scale campaigns to prevent its passage. Public opinion polls at the time showed that 83% of U.S. residents opposed any increases in immigration. Though First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, implored her husband to advance the bill, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to publicly support it.

In fact, Laura Delano Houghteling, the president's cousin and wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, James L. Houghteling, sternly warned: "20,000 charming children would all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults."

The bill never came up for a full vote in the Congress, and it died, like the children it could have saved.

Also in 1939, on May 13, 937 Germans and other citizens from Eastern European nations, mostly all Jews fleeing Nazis brutality, booked passage on the German transatlantic ocean liner, St. Louis, from the port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. Most passengers had applied for U.S. visas, and they planned to wait in Cuba on their previously-approved landing permits and temporary transit visas until U.S. officials accepted them into the U.S.

Even before embarking from Germany, the passengers' became the source of bitter political cross-partisan rivalries in Cuba as a number of conservative politicians and newspapers demanded the immediate cessation of its policy of admitting Jewish refugees on its land. The Cuban government, therefore, reneged on its offer to honor the passengers' landing permits when the St. Louis entered Cuban waters.

Faced with this unforeseen development, the ship's captain, Gustav Schroeder, turned the St. Louis toward the Florida coast of the United States in hopes that U.S. government officials would allow passengers entry on refugee status by processing their visa applications. Unfortunately, though, the political wars transpiring in Cuba on the plight of Jewish refugees were even more intense in the United States. Within the United States, President Roosevelt succumbed to conservative political pressure by following his immigration officials' decision to deny safe haven to the ship's passengers.

The captain had no other choice than to turn his ship around back toward Europe. On route, knowing that returning to Germany meant certain death for his passengers, he negotiated with a number of governments, whereby Great Britain allowed entry of 288, the Netherlands admitted 181, Belgium took 214, and France took 224. By the end of the war, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that all but one in Great Britain survived, approximately half of the remainder on the continent, 278, survived the Holocaust, and 254 died: 84 who had been in Belgium; 84 in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France.

Let Us NOT Repeat History

Throughout U.S. history, rather than characterizing refugees and refugee issues in humanitarian terms, many conservative and nationalist activists use narratives representing refugees as invading hoards, as barbarians at the gates who, if allowed to enter, will destroy the glorious civilization we have established among the "lesser" nations of the Earth. On a more basic and personal level, the rhetoric of invasion taps into our psychological fears, or more accurately, terrors of infection: our country, our workplaces, and more basically, our private places in which "aliens" forcefully penetrate our bodies, into our orifices, and down to the smallest cellular level.

President Obama has used his moral leadership to quiet the fear, the resistance, and the xenophobia in the current refugee crisis by countering the forces of prejudice. Speaking at a press conference in Manila, he expressed a rarely shown sign of frustration and anger:

"Apparently [many Republican presidential candidates] are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America. At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three-year-old orphans. That doesn't seem so tough to me....These are the same folks often times that say they're so tough that just talking to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, or staring down ISIL [ISIS], or using some additional rhetoric will solve the problem -- and they're scared of widows and three-year-old orphans."

However, today the United States stands as one of the most culturally and religiously diverse countries in the world. This diversity poses great challenges and great opportunities. The way we meet these challenges will determine whether we remain on the abyss of our history or whether we can truly achieve our promise of becoming a shining beacon to the world.

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