The Golden Door

When I first heard the President’s qualification of the countries that he would like to see fewer immigrants from, I was—to say the least—nonplussed. I was at first slightly amused to hear him use that word as an adjective, just as we did back in Queens when I was growing up. (President Trump and I are, after all, lantsleit, just not from precisely the same neighborhood.) But that sentiment wore quickly off and I was left, not amused by the public use of a term that once would have gotten someone of my generation suspended from high school for saying aloud in class, but appalled by the sentiment it so colorfully expressed.

It would be way too little to focus unduly on the vulgarity aspect. It was coarse and offensive. (As my late mother would have said, this is not the way nice people talk!)  But the word “vulgar” is not entirely correct in this context, at least not from an etymological vantage point. Derived ultimately from the Latin word for “crowd,” vulgus (pronounced with a w at the front and two long u’s: woolgoos), the word has been used in English since the fourteenth century primarily to sneer at behavior considered typical of the common people, of the “crowd” in the street. Other languages use a similar system for looking down on the masses too—the Greek hoi polloi (“the many”), the modern Hebrew word hamoni (an adjective derived from hamon “crowd”), and the Latin plebeius (derived from the regular word for the lower class, plebes) all mean the same thing. (The English word “plebeian,” now not so much in use, was once used similarly to denote behavior deemed common or commonplace.) But what was wrong with the use of that term was not its extreme colloquiality, but that it suggested an approach to immigration that feels not only contrary to our nation’s finest traditions but also deeply out of sync with what I’ve always considered to be one of the truly great aspects of our national ethos.

If anyone ever did, my great-grandparents came to our great nation from what they themselves—had they been given to expressing themselves foulmouthedly and had they known the English word—what they surely would have referenced using the President’s adjective as a country that was poor and undeveloped, a nation that had failed to provide them with even the most elemental of civil rights, and that—just to the contrary—had made the lives of the Jews unfortunate enough to live there into a kind of living hell. My paternal grandparents were born there too—in a small city called Nowy Dwór, about thirty miles to the northwest of Warsaw—and they came here specifically to re-invent themselves in this place and, if they could manage it (which they did), to flourish here as well.

Of course, they came here when all you needed to be accepted as an immigrant was to be free of disease and able to answer a few simple questions in simple English when the man at Ellis Island asked them of you. (I’m not entirely sure when they arrived, but it was definitely between 1899 and 1904.)  They were not well-educated Norwegians possessed of all the skills necessary effortless to self-integrate into American society. They did not have college degrees or any sort of professional training. They certainly did not have jobs waiting for them or, for that matter, homes pre-arranged and just waiting for them to move in upon arrival and set up shop. They were white people in the sense that they weren’t black people—but they were certainly what the people who would like to see our gates primarily open to white people, they were most certainly not what those people mean by white!  

With these thoughts in mind, I found myself drawn to the archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, accessible to all at https://www.jta.org/archive, which I often do when I am in need of some historical perspective. And while I was coasting around there I found an article filed on January 1, 1924, entitled “America on Eve of Closing Gates to Jewish Immigration” that really stuck me as something worth sharing with all of you.  You can click here to read it for yourself and I strongly suggest that you do!

The basic idea is simple enough to seize: there were many, many Americans that could not stomach the thought that continued unrestricted immigration to our country might upset the balance between the overwhelmingly white and Christian majority and the various minority groups that, it was widely thought, were dramatically over-represented in the immigration statistics, and the Immigration Act of 1924 was intended to address that issue head-on. The authors of the bill, Congressman Albert Johnson (R-Washington) and Senator David Reed (R-Pennsylvania), focused on the nationality of would-be immigrants. But nationality itself was not quite precise enough for Senator Thomas Sterling (R-South Dakota), who was responsible for adding an amendment to the bill that would guarantee that no “racial” group would be overrepresented in its national quota because no “racial” group could henceforth constitute a larger percentage of the people admitted from that country to the United States as immigrants than they represented in the population back home. And who exactly do you imagine Senator Sterling, later dean of the George Washington University Law School, had in mind as he formulated his amendment? There’s no need to wonder too intensely—I can just quote the JTA article:

Senator Sterling, after introducing his amendment, frankly admitted to the JTA correspondent that it was aimed chiefly at the Jews who, he asserted, have been emigrating to American in disproportionately large numbers. The population of Poland, he said, is only 13% Jewish, but four Jews have been coming to every one Pole, and the same is practically true of Russia and Rumania. This is unfair to the predominating population of those countries, Sterling declared, who should be admitted according to their own proportion. Sterling denied prejudice against the Jews, assenting he was desirous only of giving the other peoples “a square deal.”

And it worked: about 120,000 Jews came to America in 1921; the year after the new quotas went into effect, 1927, the number was 10,000. A square deal…for whom exactly? Certainly not for Jewish people eager to flee oppression and re-invent themselves in the Land of Opportunity, now off-limits until enough ethnic Poles decided for some reason to abandon their homeland and seek their fortune elsewhere.

It would be unreasonable to lay Treblinka at Senator Sterling’s feet—surely no matter how eager he was to see fewer Jews immigrate to the United States, he could not possibly have conceived of the unimaginable hell to which he was inadvertently consigning those in whose face he was shutting the gates.  But those gates occupy a major part of my thinking on the matter as well because it was those exact gates, the ones to Ellis Island, that not thirty years earlier Emma Lazarus had characterized as a golden door when she imagined Lady Liberty herself addressing the immigrants arriving in New York Harbor on their way to a new life: “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!” It was that specific invitation that called my great-grandparents and grandparents to this place.

After all these years I still cannot read those line about the golden door without tears coming to my eyes. And for one specific reason: because—and I know how crazy this must sound—because I have always imagined the Lady actually speaking those words aloud to my grandparents, then newly-weds in search of a new life and, of course, fully unaware of what the future had in store for the Jews of their town back home. In my mind’s eye, I can see my grandparents looking to the west, to the future, to America as the boat enters the harbor. But I can also see the Lady, and she is looking, not to the west, but to the east to greet them…and taking note as she does of the smoke rising in the distance (and in the future) from the ruins of the Nowy Dwór ghetto as the last Jews present were finally deported to their deaths on December 12, 1942, and the ghetto itself was burnt to the ground. My grandparents were safe. Their future children, including my father, were safe. And I myself only exist because they were, because they had someplace to flee to, to settle in, and to be grateful the rest of their lives to God for.

So, in my heart, it is precisely from the countries the President used such a tasteless, coarse term to denigrate that we should be permitting immigration. Why would Norwegians want to come here anyway—wasn’t it just last year that Norway, jumped three spots forward and displaced Denmark as “the world’s happiest country”? (We came in fourteenth. Click here for more details.) And the world’s least happy countries? Occupying the last five spots on the CNN list are Rwanda, Syria, Tanzania, Burundi, and the Central African Republic. Do you see a pattern? I bet the President does too! But those are precisely the tempest-tost souls we should be welcoming to this place…and offering a place in the American mosaic, in the crazy-quilt of ethnicities and national origins that somehow together create the America that, precisely because of our rejection of prejudice and ethnic hatred, was and remains the envy of so many in our sorry world. The whole concept of America requires that our doors be open—yes, within reason, and surely only open to people prepared to embrace American culture and to participate in our American democracy, and who can demonstrate their willingness to become patriotic citizens in the style of the immigrants to these shores of generations past—to people fleeing oppression, misery, poverty, and prejudice back home. That’s what we do here…and I suppose we can make room for a few Norwegians too.  Maybe we can learn a thing or two about being happy from them!