Jon Miller on the Statue of Liberty's poem

Miller makes good points about the history of the Statue of Liberty, which came from France without a poem attached to it. The poem, written by Emma Lazarus, was slapped on in 1903, in an era when immigration policy was actually much stricter than it is today, i.e., the poem was never a paean for open borders. The video below provides a good history lesson.

My take, however, is this: the left likes quoting the "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free" line, and I completely agree with the spirit of that line because I'm not anti-immigration. What I am is anti-illegal immigration, which means my focus is on the final four words of the above quote: yearning to be free. Quite a few of the people we blithely let into our country do not yearn to be free. They do not yearn to integrate or assimilate; they do not yearn to adopt twenty-first century morals and customs, or to recognize our laws as the ultimate law of the land. For those reasons, they ought not to be let into our country. The poem itself is ammunition for this sentiment.