Does The Statue Of Liberty Poem Invalidate U.S. Borders Or Require Giving Welfare To Non-Citizens?

Acting Director of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli announced a change in the “public charge” rule Monday that will deny green cards for immigrants on Medicaid, food stamps, housing vouchers, and other public welfare. It of course elicited liberally charged questions from reporters.

The “public charge” rule, enacted in 1882, requires green card applicants to prove they will not be a burden to the United States. The new changes, detailed in an 800-page document going into effect mid-October, will determine “the totality of the circumstances when making a public charge inadmissibility determination.”

“Through the public charge rule, President Trump’s administration is re-enforcing the ideal of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, ensuring that immigrants are able to support themselves and become successful in America,” Cuccinelli said in the press conference.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) arrests of several hundred illegal aliens in Mississippi last week incited yet another cycle of media outrage. Several White House reporters asked Cuccinelli about it. One quoted the poetic sentiment engraved on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor…” Is this sentiment, he asked, still operative in the United States, or should it be removed from our statue?

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The reporter was referring to the poem “The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus in 1883. At the end of the poem Lady Liberty cries out, “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!”

Read the rest from Susanna Hoffman HERE at The Federalist.

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