Thread by @WillMcAvoyACN

Emma Lazarus, who wrote "The New Colossus", the poem that is being misrepresented by @USCISCuccinelli today, was a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors were among a small number of Jews who escaped the inquisition in Brazil and made a home in what would become New York.

@USCISCuccinelli Lazarus wrote the poem as a tribute explicitly for Jewish refugees who were fleeing persecution and were seeking a new home in America.

@USCISCuccinelli It should be noted that the Statue of Liberty was not intentionally made into a symbol of immigration, at least not immediately. Indeed, the connection between the statue and the poem is almost coincidental.

@USCISCuccinelli During the years of construction for the project, various fundraising efforts were instituted. Lazarus was asked to submit a poem, but she initially declined, as at the time she was focused on the plight of Eastern European Jews, who had been subject to targeted violence.

@USCISCuccinelli This targeted violence would occasionally swell into mass killings or persecutions that came not from governments, but from civilians. These are often referred to as 'pogroms', a Russian word that literally translates as "to harm".

@USCISCuccinelli This was what was on Lazarus' mind when she wrote
"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!"

@USCISCuccinelli She was not talking about the lower classes of Western European society, she was talking about people fleeing targeted violence seeking refuge and a new life miles away from their homeland. @USCISCuccinelli is dead wrong in his understanding of this poem's meaning and intents.

@USCISCuccinelli While Lazarus saw The Statue as a beacon welcoming immigrants--specifically refugees--it is only because of the nearby Ellis Island that the intent spread beyond the initial people who saw her poem. The Statue of Liberty, through natural terms, became a beacon for immigration.

@USCISCuccinelli It was not intent, but experience that made it so. As such, a plaque containing the words to Lazarus' poem was added, years after construction and Lazarus' death, to explicitly state the ideas that through America's lived in ideals became true.

At least for a time.