[Reposted and slightly revised from a 2019 post.]
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 illegal-immigrant-loving 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, often omitted by the left: 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 "wretched refuse." 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.
When the French gifted the Statue it was to commemorate Liberty, not immigration. Perhaps it was a mistake placing it in the harbor where it is seen as greeting new arrivals. Maybe we should move it inland, there is surely an inland area of the country which more better represents the sentiment which inspired the gift.
ReplyDeleteAnd, we need a national contest to replace the Lazarus poem, those two things should not be combined. Liberty has no relation to immigration.
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Those two things may contribute greatly toward making our nation a place where those yearning to be free can find an example of what it means to live free. And, then they can change their homelands to fit the model.
I agree in principle. The problem I have is how do you draw the line and say someone has integrated/assimilated enough? From an outsider's perspective, the US seems so polarized that it would be hard to define what American values are. Above all, America's overarching value seems to be freedom - freedom of speech, freedom of worship and the reluctance to restrict much of anything.
ReplyDeleteBoth you and I have been living in Korea for a long time and expect to live here for a long time to come. We have probably both assimilated as far as we are ever going to. Have we assimilated enough? Based on anecdotal evidence from your blog, your Korean seems to be fair to middling, you mostly seem to eat non-Korean food, and you often rail against "the Korean way of doing things", and the same goes for me. Would you consider someone similar to you or I living in the States to have assimilated enough?
And what about the Amish? I'm not sure they can be said to be demonstrating modern American values... do you get a pass if you eschew American values as long as you aren't a recent immigrant?
There are some interesting philosophical discussions to be had around this subject, and I've touched on some of them from time to time in my newspaper column.
[Part I]
DeleteWhat I can say for now is that this is a continuing discussion. It's doubtful that we'll ever arrive at a definitive, eternal answer to any of these philosophical questions. America is a process as much as it's anything else, but like all things-in-process, it also perdures, i.e., retains continuity and distinctness, like the human body as it moves through time—both changing and constant. But in terms of what ought to be considered "core values," I guess you could go back to the country's founding documents, some of which, like our Constitution, are admittedly still works in progress and subject to interpretation. And many of these values still inform, or should inform, our modern sensibilities. So just as there's a such thing as "American food" and "British food" and "Korean food," there's a such thing as American values, British values, and Korean values.
Also: Koreans, unlike Americans, don't necessarily want long-term expats to assimilate. They just want foreigners to obey the law and otherwise behave in Korean society (i.e., don't be Johnny Somali). Korean racism, meanwhile, makes it clear that even the most fluent Korean-speaking foreigners are never going to become Korean, in any sense of the word "become." They could hold a Korean passport as naturalized citizens, but they still wouldn't be considered "really" Korean. Think about the cultures' contrasting linguistic expectations: Koreans are routinely surprised by (or they feign surprise to) foreigners who speak any Korean at all. Korean expectations are low: they don't expect foreigners to know any Korean. Americans, by contrast, get frustrated when a person with a foreign accent can't express himself in English after having been a neighbor for twenty years. "What the hell've you been doing all this time that you still can't speak any English?" Americans feel no obligation to speak the foreigner's native tongue, but Koreans will often feel pressure to speak to a foreigner in English (casually assuming he's not, say, French or Argentinian or Russian) because they don't expect the foreigner to have learned any Korean. The French do much the same thing, but in France, this is associated with a sort of snootiness or snobbishness: "I, as a Frenchman, will condescend to speak to you in English because I already know your French will be terrible."
[Part II]
DeleteAs for how much Korean food I eat: I don't usually photograph the food I get at restaurants, nor do I generally photograph the Korean food I buy and eat at home. Mostly, you see pics of food I make at home, and it's true that I don't make much Korean food. I've never even rolled a single roll of kimbap before. I should probably make that a project: learning how to make certain basic Korean foods. I have shown off, on the blog, my (regular) fried rice, bulgogi, galbi, and various tangs and jjigaes as well as bad-for-you foods like tangsuyuk and ddeokbokgi, but I could show off more. Fact is, I eat plenty of Korean food, but like my heritage, I'd say it's about half-and-half. And there's some Korean food I avoid, like dogani-tang and sea squirts and san-nakji. (Cooked octopus in stew or a bokgeum is fine.) I also avoid Western foods like liver and onions, and you already know of my neurosis about onions in general (I'm bizarrely okay with them in Korean food, though; I've blogged about that, too).
But back to the point: as I implied above, the question of values leads more to dialogue than to solid, definitive answers. On a practical level, though, I think 90% of the US's problems would be resolved if people simply obeyed the law—and that would be true for immigrants and citizens alike. No murder, no rape, no theft, no road rage, no destruction of property, no obstruction of free speech, no public loudness except in sanctioned times and spaces, etc. That would, I think, eliminate most problems. The Amish quietly follow the (modern) law, so I have no problem with what they do as a hermetic community. Muslims who insist on shari'a and not the law of the land, by contrast, are problematic. Islam in general is problematic because in Islam, there is no such thing as a secular realm: everything is suffused with religious significance, which is in contrast to what scholar Bernard Lewis noted about Jesus when Jesus said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's," arguably paving the way for a secular/sacred, church/state contrast (see Lewis, Islam and the West). Until Islam develops that same sense, I don't think it's compatible with Western values. If you move to another country and don't expect to integrate to a significant degree, or at least to obey and respect local laws, customs, and values, you should never have come in the first place. That's why I'm not a Canadian who comes to Korea and insists on growing pot in his apartment.
Anyway, I ramble.