Liberty
2026
Engraved on a plaque of bronze in the Statue of Liberty Museum are a few lines of a sonnet, “The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus.
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!
Many of us are familiar with and deeply moved by these lines, which remind us of America’s generosity and abundance. And many of us wonder what went so wrong with our immigration policies.
How that lamp beside our once golden door began to flicker so perilously with passage of The Immigration Act of 1924.
Emma Lazarus, who saw such a different America, was 34 when she wrote the sonnet these lines are taken from in 1883.
Four years later, she was gone, stolen from us by cancer.
