the Statue of Liberty's poem

The Statue of Liberty came from France in 1885 without a poem attached to it. The poem, The New Colossus, written by Emma Lazarus (a socialist), 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" 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 breathe free. Quite a few of the people we blithely let into our country do not yearn to breathe 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. To yearn to breathe free means to accept freedom as Americans conceive of it, to share in American values and priorities. This is what is implied by the poem. The poem isn't saying the statue represents a blind, heedless embrace of all human garbage. The poem itself was never meant to serve as immigration policy, but it is ammunition for the sentiment I describe above.

The above video also mentions the Immigration Act of 1882, which AI summarizes this way:

The Immigration Act of 1882, also known as the General Immigration Act, was a federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on August 3, 1882. It imposed a head tax of 50 cents on each immigrant and restricted the entry of certain individuals, including those considered idiots, lunatics, convicts, or likely to become a public charge.

Emphasis added. We could do with a lot fewer idiots, lunatics, convicts, and "public charges" clogging up the voter rolls (and society) and stupidly casting their votes today.