When I was a child, my mother took my two sisters and me to Sunday School every Sunday at the United Church of Christ in Pottsville. We all sang in the children’s choir and we loved our choir director, Mrs. Dorothy Loy.
Not only did we sing each week during the Sunday School service and once a month in the main sanctuary, we put on a yearly extravaganza, a performance somewhere between a Broadway show and a sing-along around the campfire. We sold tickets to the show and played to a packed house, using the proceeds to pay for choir outings to Washington, D.C. or, most memorably, the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
I remember singing “Umiak Kayak, Mukluk, Tupik,” a song of “Eskimo words,” and “Second-hand Rose,” a 1921 Ziegfeld Follies hit popularized by Barbara Streisand in “Funny Girl.”
We also sang Irving Berlin’s musical rendition of “The New Colossus,” the 1883 sonnet by Emma Lazarus, engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “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!”
As children, we were very moved by that song. It swells like a wave, constantly gaining in force, but then, almost miraculously, breaks gently on a welcoming shore. Lady Liberty gathers in her children and protects them from the storm.
Emma Lazarus’s poem was engraved on the statue’s base in 1903. One year earlier, during “the Great Strike of 1902” that lasted 163 days and affected the entire anthracite region, newly arrived immigrants were transported directly from Ellis Island to the mines. Escorted by the Coal and Iron Police, these men who spoke no English went to work as “scabs,” which earned them the lasting hatred of their new neighbors, striking miners fighting for a better life.
A few years earlier, on September 10, 1897, in Lattimer, PA, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian immigrants organized a protest against unfair working conditions in mines near Hazleton. By the end of that day, nineteen of them were dead, shot by members of the Pennsylvania State Militia.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, thus went the life of immigrants. And for many, Lady Liberty’s promise went unfulfilled.
In 1924, President Coolidge signed the National Origins Act, the United States’ first comprehensive immigration law whose goal was the preservation of “national homogeneity.” Already in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all Chinese immigration, but the new law of 1924 created numerical limitations for all countries and set up a racial and national hierarchy. In other words, severe limitations were placed on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and Africa. Asians and Arabs were denied citizenship.
Not until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, did most measures of the 1924 law become obsolete.
At the beginning of the 21st century, a new and powerful symbol of America’s relationship to the “huddled masses” entered into competition with the legendary image of Lady Liberty lifting her lamp. The United States-Mexico border wall has cast a shadow on this monument to freedom and a welcoming democracy.
The European Union has also been busy putting up walls and the most recent began to rise in July 2015 when Hungary undertook the construction of a fence along its border with Serbia. So far, it has not stopped the flow of refugees from Syria, Eritrea, Iraq or Afghanistan, but this wall has become a symbol of the deep divisions among the 28 members of the European Union during what is the world’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
To summarize some of the important events of the past month, on September 7th, Germany pledged over 6 billion dollars for the cost and care of the 800,000 refugees the country expects to receive by the end of 2015; yet on September 14th, it reinstated border controls, abolished within the EU by the Schengen Agreement of 1995. Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands soon followed suit.
Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia have voiced a preference for Christian refugees, whereas Hungary has begun denying all asylum requests.
France has pledged to accept 24,000 refugees this year, but this quota is not being filled. Refugees prefer Germany or Sweden to France, “the country of human rights,” which inscribed the right to asylum in its Constitution of 1793.
Rumors travel fast in today’s world, even among refugees. France has become identified with dirty and dangerous refugee camps, too much unemployment, too much bureaucracy, and a nationalist far-right party, the National Front, whose power and influence is on the rise.
As for how France sees itself, I’d say the nation is anxious and doubtful about its identity and place in the world.
Many of the French fear their country cannot afford to welcome thousands of refugees. With the largest Muslim population of all of Europe, estimated at around 6 million, they also fear that more Muslims would pose a permanent threat to French identity. And with a large population of citizens and legal residents who are unemployed, some who are homeless or living in substandard housing, voices are being raised to ask why the country is not taking care of its own first.
Putting into practice what some EU nations have stated as a preference, the mayors of the French cities of Belfort and Roanne have publicly announced their intention to accept only Christian refugees.
As the migration crisis is taking on the tone of a religious conflict, I’d like to conclude with the thoughts of some experts in the field:
Pope Francis has chosen as his mission to build bridges where there are walls. World leaders, please take note.
Former Pope Benedict XVI provides a clear definition of refugees: “All migrants are human beings who possess fundamental and inalienable rights that must be respected by all and at all times.”
He also reminds us that Islamism is not Islam: “Religion is disfigured when put in the service of ignorance, prejudice, violence, scorn and abuse. In such cases, we observe not only a perversion of religion, but corruption of human freedom, a narrowing and blinding of the spirit,” adding that “such an outcome can be prevented.”
As for Jesus, he would feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty and invite the stranger into his home.
It has never been easy to be a migrant. Nor is it easy to welcome the stranger with open arms: a difficult challenge and food for thought in these challenging times.
