Rights, Immigrants, and the American Dream

"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

This is the end of the poem found in the Statue of Liberty. What I find interesting about it is that you almost always hear the first part “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” without the “yearning to breathe free” part. And yet this is the promise of America. The reason that immigrants were coming to our nation was not because of the great health care, or the wonderful education that they could receive or any sort of reason like that. It was so that they could be free. They wanted to work, and to enjoy the fruits of their labor without having others take from them what they had earned. This idea of freedom, of a way of life where you neither owed anything to anyone nor did anyone owe you anything, was transformational.

This is the reason for the line “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”. It was not because of charity or pity. Instead it was because in the nations that were ruled by kings and lords, men who took their place in life by their birthright, these huddled masses were wretches that were considered a problem. But give them to us and we will give them freedom, and these people who were a drain on your nation with your system of authority granted by birthright, will become our strength.

These former wretches came to our shores and they worked, and they invented, and they turned the wheels of industry. And our strength, which came from those who were rejected by other nations, grew so great that America is now the strongest nation that the world has ever seen. Even in our current economic decline, our economic, military, cultural, and technological influence is unprecedented in the history of the world.

Yet over the years, this system has changed. We have lost the notion that everyman is free. All of our ideas have been perverted. Freedom no longer means living without owing anything to anyone or being owed anything by anyone. We now say that freedom is taking from the rich and giving to the poor. There is weak logic for this, such as the thought that the rich have not come by their wealth honestly. But this is a fallacy. If the rich's gains are ill-gotten they should be tried in court, the answer is not to introduce a system of denying people the enjoyment of the fruit of their labor. Nor can you say that the disadvantages of being poor are so great as to have ruined the American Dream. For in a free nation there has always been a tradition of the poor, through their discipline and ingenuity born from their poverty, toppling the power held by those who gained it through inheritance.

The idea of a right no longer means what it did at the founding of our nation. Take the line from The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. What are rights in this document? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. These cannot be given. That is why we are endowed by our Creator with rights. No man can give life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, he can only take it away.

Today rights refer to the government's guarantee to another man's property or service. Today's “rights” violate yesterdays freedom. The “right” to health care requires making slaves of doctors, or the people who's property is confiscated to pay for their services. The same is true of the “right” to an education.

This is why the bronze plaque in the Statue of Liberty that has Emma Lazarus' poem engraved on it no longer applies. This is the reason why open boarders are no longer a good idea. Our society has gone from a place where people are transformed from being dependent on the state to being industrious, to the exact opposite.