In 1883, the Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus wrote the poem "The New Colossus" in honor of the Statue of Liberty, then currently under construction. Starting in 1886, the Statue would begin to great recently arrived immigrants as they arrived to Ellis Island. The poem is as follows:
The New ColossusNot like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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!”—Emma Lazarus, 1883
The poem displays all the ambiguity that America has displayed to its new arrivals. On the one hand, we have the image of Lady Liberty's torch burning a "world-wide welcome." She is the "mother of exiles" who greats immigrants as they come to shore. However, Lazarus's attitude toward the new immigrants themselves is not wholly welcoming. They are the "huddled masses," the "wretched refuse" of the Old World, and are quite literally "homeless." These sentiments were contradictory, but they were held by the native-born and by those who had immigrated earlier or were the children of immigrants.
On the U. S. government's official web page about immigration, Hasia Diner writes:
Gradually over the course of the decades after the Civil War, as the sources of immigration shifted so too did the technology of ocean travel. Whereas previous immigrants had made their way to the United States via sail power, innovations in steam transportation made it possible for larger ships to bring larger loads of immigrants to the United States. The immigrants of this era tended to come from southern and eastern Europe, regions undergoing at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries the same economic transitions that western and northern Europe had earlier experienced.
As among the immigrants of the earlier period, young people predominated among the newcomers. This wave of migration, which constituted the third episode in the history of U.S. immigration, could better be referred to as a flood of immigrants, as nearly 25 million Europeans made the voyage. Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, and others speaking Slavic languages constituted the bulk of this migration. Included among them were 2.5 to 3 million Jews.
Each group evinced a distinctive migration pattern in terms of the gender balance within the migratory pool, the permanence of their migration, their literacy rates, the balance between adults and children, and the like. But they shared one overarching characteristic: They flocked to urban destinations and made up the bulk of the U.S. industrial labor pool, making possible the emergence of such industries as steel, coal, automobile, textile, and garment production, and enabling the United States to leap into the front ranks of the world’s economic giants.
Their urban destinations, their numbers, and perhaps a fairly basic human antipathy towards foreigners led to the emergence of a second wave of organized xenophobia. By the 1890s, many Americans, particularly from the ranks of the well-off, white, native-born, considered immigration to pose a serious danger to the nation’s health and security. In 1893 a group of them formed the Immigration Restriction League, and it, along with other similarly inclined organizations, began to press Congress for severe curtailment of foreign immigration.
At the same time, American also experienced its first wave of Asian immigration from China. Chinese immigrants, mostly men, arrived in the American West to work on the railroads and other labor-intensive projects. White Americans looked down on these immigrants and lobbied Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively banned all immigration from China. The result was that it produced a small and segregated Chinese community largely on the West Coast.
In the 1920s, Congress heavily restricted immigration from the Eastern hemisphere. This produced a quota system from immigrants from both Europe and Asia. It effectively limited immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, but did allow for significant immigration from Western Europe. The National Origins Act however did not restrict immigration from the Western hemisphere and so immigration from the Caribbean and Latin America moved quite freely. In 1965, the Hart-Cellar Act, inspired by civil rights legislation, reversed the overtly racist and discriminatory immigration polices of the United States. The law replaced the quota system of The National Origins Act and replaced it with a system that weighed family relations and job skills. It dramatically opened up immigration from Asia and Africa and as such these populations have increased exponentially in the United States.
Immigration remains a "hot-button" issue in the United States and nativist thought runs deep in our politics. For this reason it is important to examine the early immigrant literature of the United States.
Reading:
Abraham Cahan (473-5), "A Sweat-Shop Romance," 475-83 (course packet)
Emma Lazarus, all poems, 429-32
Sui Sin Far (549-50), "Mrs. Spring Fragrance," 550-8
Study Questions:
1. How does scarcity in the realm of economics and romance structure the conflicts of Cahan's story? How do these issues resolve themselves?
2. How would you characterize the tone of Mrs. Spring Fragrance's letter to her husband? Does she say what she means? How do you know? Most of Sui Sin Far's audience is white. What role does the exotic nature of Jade's prose play in addressing this audience?
