The New Colossus: Message to the Bottles, Essay Example

The message of this poem is that America welcomes the poor of the world, that poverty and religion are no barrier to citizenship. My thesis is that, although the message alone makes America unique of all the nations of the world — no other nation has so opened its doors to the world — it was not a statute of liberty. Beyond an invitation to improve America by their work, nothing would be done for immigrants. It was entirely up to the people themselves to rise — but how well and how quickly they rose depended on who they were before they arrived here. In other words, as HTY 110HA Module 1 AVP notes, a lot depended on what their push and pull factors were. To succeed the fastest, a people’s pull in theory would be greater than their push.

HTY 110HA Module 2 AVP starts with the Irish. Their push factor was famine that started well before Emma Lazarus wrote her poem. They could look like the majority culture if they dressed the part, but that was all. In practice they were considered by many to be almost subhuman, and Southern overseers used the Irish for work too dangerous for African slaves. But the Irish had a critical advantage over other non-English immigrants: they arrived speaking English. That might be called their pull factor — it made America’s promise that much easier to attain. Both hurt and helped by their Catholicism (if they were Catholic) poor immigrant Irish used their organizational skills — probably learned at home in response to English oppression — to practice the arts of city politics. They rose to full assimilation. No employer today would think of discriminating against a job-applicant with an O’ in front of the last name. Probably many non-Catholic Irish-Americans today with such an O’ do not even think of themselves as Irish. If the Irish had it bad at first — and they did — we can only imagine how bad and how different their lives would have been had they also been unable to speak English. Here is a perverse way that Lazarus’ poem lived up to its promise for the Irish in general: for many years American companies outsourced work to Ireland because the labor was cheap yet fluent in English.

HTY 110HA Module 2 AVP also discusses the Germans, the nation that in the 19^th century surprisingly sent more immigrants to America than any other country. Their pull-factor was the highest. More of them arrived with money and skills than not. Take the brewing of beer: one might almost argue that German brewers were less immigrants than businessmen relocating to be closer to the new customers they would soon have — and did. It helped them with the “nativists” that they were not, like so many of the Irish, Catholic in their religion. Their drawback was not speaking English. Yet it should not be forgotten that in spite of their relative prosperity, the Germans were fiercely mistreated during the Great War of 1914–1918. This anticipated the treatment of another set of immigrants: the Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II, although the Germans at least did not have their assets seized before being put into camps. The example of both the Germans and the Japanese in America reminds us that economic success and apparent assimilation is not necessarily a sign of true assimilation. Assimilation is something that the dominant culture also has to do with an immigrant people. The difference is that the dominant culture has nothing to prove. It assimilates passively if at all.

HTY 110HA Module 3 AVP discusses the Jews, a people who, until the establishment of Israel as a nation in 1948, were nearly always outsiders if not immigrants. In America as immigrants they found relief from the massacres, economic oppression, and social segregation of the Old World. They also found Lower East Side–scale poverty, although it should be noted that many German Jews had immigrated much earlier and had already often found prosperity and assimilation. For many years German Jew vs. non–German Jew was a great divide separating all Jews living in America. This points out an important fact about the Jews: although they basically shared the same religion, they were of many different nationalities. In the case of non-German Jews, their great wave to America started in the 1880s when oppression in Russian-held areas made life impossible for them. Many of the “huddled masses” of the New Colossus were in fact Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia. In any case, overall the Jews have achieved full assimilation in America where they have chosen to pursue it. A few do not, and prefer to live in their own small urban neighborhoods, dress uniquely according to their particular sect, and practice their religion obsessively. But most do not, although it is probably unlikely that, like so many nth-generation non-Catholic Irish in America, they have stopped identifying with their Old World heritage altogether. Regardless, for the Jews, the promise of Lazarus’s poem was kept.

HTY 110HA Module 4 AVP discusses the Chinese and Japanese in America. It should be noted first one important distinction between the Chinese and the Jews. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, by which the Federal Government enforced discrimination against Chinese immigrants. That date coincides almost to the year when massive Jewish emigration to America began from Eastern Europe and Russia. Jews, so long discriminated against in Europe and nearly everywhere else, were at least not at the bottom of the heap in America. That distinction is shared by Asians and Africans.

Emigration of Chinese and Japanese to America in the 19^th century is largely a story of California, which gained admission as a state in 1849.  Other than the Mexicans they were the first wave of immigrants who did not see the Statue of Liberty upon their arrival. Asian immigrants landed on Angel Island, where, as the module points out, they were treated badly and often rejected in ways that no one experienced in New York. Although many white Americans were ignorant of the distinctions between Japanese and Chinese at first, over time (until World War II), the Japanese did somewhat better than the Chinese. This reflects the fact that the Japanese government was not weak and in disarray, and growing awareness by the world of its ongoing modernization tended to reflect relatively well on the Japanese in America and overseas in general. It made them at least somewhat distinct from the Chinese: the Japanese, like the Germans, were not all a bunch of huddled masses. Also like the Germans, hard work plus the Asian tendency to keep out of white society as much as possible did not help them when the chips were down. In California after the Gold Rush and after the transcontinental railroads were built the Chinese were violently treated and finally excluded from further immigration. As for Japanese-Americans, World War II found them being treated like potential traitors.

Both groups sent mostly men, leading to gender imbalances, particularly among the Chinese and this took a long time to rectify. Both groups put a premium on education, like the Jews. And like the Jews, this focus helped their succeeding generations more than it did the original immigrants. In fact America did better by all immigrants’ children than it did the parents. So did the Lazarus’ poem keep its promise to the Japanese and Chinese? Yes it did, but we may say that it did so with little or no help from the Statue of Liberty and the sentiments that built it. So we might say that neither group ever “owned” the poem. Both groups wisely retained their cultural identity, and it was this that helped them the most. Both groups today are fully assimilated in one sense but in another they are not, never having forgotten that the Statue of Liberty had its back to them, literally and metaphorically, when they first began to arrive.

HTY 110HA Module 5 AVP  discusses Africans subject to a 100% push force to America. They faced a different rejection: Africa turned its back on them — enemy tribes captured them and sent them on a one-way trip across the ocean, never to return. But the module also points out their massive internal immigration — “the largest internal migration of people within the United States” — that American blacks followed, specifically out of the South to northern cities to escape unemployment and Jim Crow. Did The New Colossus speak to that?

No, although it has since spoken to other African immigrants and even lived up to its promise to many of them. But not to the slaves and many if not most of their descendants. The poem also did not speak to Native Americans, one demographic actually worse off than African-Americans. Why? It may be that a perverse kind of paternalism is at fault. Blacks were prevented from freeing themselves from slavery and never took control of the education of the children. Maybe if they had had their own languages they could have. Native Americans had their own languages but their children were banned from using them in school. In other words, the separation that the Japanese and the Chinese enjoyed may yet help other Americans by enabling them to create working subcultures that the dominant culture will recognize as valuable.

In 1979, the English rock group The Police had a hit with Message in a Bottle. It is about an island castaway who puts a message in a bottle and throws it in the ocean. Nothing happens for a year, after which “a hundred billion bottles” wash up on the shore. Emma Lazarus’ poem is kind of like that song. The poem was itself an artistic Help Wanted message floated overseas. And the bottles that arrived in response were the ships that brought the huddled masses shown in Edwin Levick’s Immigrants Approaching Statue of Liberty.

The poem lived up to the promise for lucky and hard-working immigrants and especially their children and grandchildren. But there were and are many whom the poem did not speak to. Their bottles were broken. Their help was not wanted and in many cases still is not wanted, even as new immigrants keep on arriving within sight of the statue that made the poem famous.