||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||
Words at the base of the Statue of Liberty that stands over the New York Harbor:
“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-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
Um…Maybe not right now. We are too busy arguing about who (and why they should be allowed or not) to enter the US, pursue citizenship and establish lives. We are too busy building walls, questioning rights of refugees, holding refugees in ‘centers’ in unsafe conditions, deporting those who enter illegally. We have failed to keep records of children separated from parents and even now some families cannot find each other years after they were separated, sometimes with parents deported. We call that ‘defending the border.
The subject of immigration is interesting to me in that unless one’s ancestry is 100% Native American, we are all immigrants or at least descendants of immigrants. Many of us (but so far, not me) are interested in our ancestry, and use DNA kits to see which percentages of our genes are from which regions of the world. When I was younger, I liked to say that my mother was London-born and my father Oxford-born. While that was technically true as my mother was born in London, England, of American parents, and my father was born in Oxford, North Carolina, I suppose I thought having even fake foreign parents made me slightly more exotic. (Nope.)
There is one clear advantage of having only Northern European genes is if you are unlucky enough to need a bone marrow or stem cell transplant. There are many more donors on the Registry who might be a match for you. If one’s ancestry is otherwise or of mixed race, you may have to depend on stem cells from umbilical cord blood (which is obviously in much shorter supply). Just one more example of how racial privilege is (even inadvertently) manifested.
But back to the subject of immigration. As we are all immigrants or descendants (again, unless we are 100% Native American), why are we so worried about immigrants? Is it concern about scarce resources, or possibly contamination, as at least one of our current politicians asserts that ‘the blood of our country is being poisoned by immigrants’ Is it just one more way of designating individuals or group as ‘other’ and somehow inferior or unworthy’? Do we have rights, legal or implicit, because we have been here longer, claimed privileges, land and its assets we are unwilling to share? At least some of our ancestors came in poverty, hoping for better opportunities in America. Is it because we all want to be the last to get off the boat before the ramp is pulled up?
As I mentioned before on what used to be Columbus Day, was America ‘discovered’ and subsequently claimed and owned, when it was already occupied and being used? And further, how about Orcas Island? Do those of us who have been here longer think we have the right to prevent others from coming to live here? (As if financial status doesn’t do a good enough job of that already?) Ownership of land, resources, rights, privileges is interesting and always fraught with controversy.
While I was reading up a bit on the history of US citizenship, there was a time when Africans and their offspring could not become citizens by virtue of race whether or not they had been brought here against their will as slaves and owned, according to the Dred Scott Case of 1857, with the Supreme Court of the United States ruling upholding slavery in United States territories, denied the legality of black and Chinese citizenship in America, The Fourteenth Amendment passed in 1866 changed all that, or at least the law. Until then, only White people could be citizens of the United States with voting and other rights and privileges.
Now children born in the US automatically gain US citizenship (are ‘natural born citizens’) even if their parents are not. That seems to be not only on US soil but on US waters or in US airspace as well. Not so long ago, Hawaii-born Barack Obama’s birth certificate was questioned by Donald Trump when Obama was running for president and was subsequently elected in 2008. (To be President of the United States, one must have been born a US citizen at least 35 years ago.)
Naturalized citizenship is a lot more complex, although being legally married to a US citizen modifies that a bit. It is not within the ability of this writer to say any more about that subject.
A little bit of history of the Statue of Liberty the website Britannica posted on the web, updated December 27, 2023:
‘A French historian, Édouard de Laboulaye, made the proposal for the statue in 1865. Funds were contributed by the French people, and work began in France in 1875 under sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. The statue was constructed of copper sheets, hammered into shape by hand and assembled over a framework of four gigantic steel supports, designed by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. The colossus was presented to the American minister to France Levi Morton (later US vice president under President Harrison) in a ceremony in Paris on July 4, 1884. In 1885 the completed statue, 151 feet 1 inch (46 metres) high and weighing 225 tons, was disassembled and shipped to New York City. The pedestal, designed by American architect Richard Morris Hunt and built within the walls of Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island, was completed later. The statue, mounted on its pedestal, was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886.’
France financed the statue; US the base. None of this recently restrained one of our news hosts of using the Statue of Liberty as an example of US artistic superiority. Perhaps he was speaking of the base on which Lady Liberty stands.
I suppose the Statue of Liberty is one immigrant we are happy to allow permanent citizenship, even though she can’t become president. (There seems to be no law that requires the president to be currently alive.)
You can read the whole website here, including a photo of Lady Liberty’s left foot (though I’m not sure of the significance of that) here: https://www.britannica.com/
And who counted as “white” has changed over the years.
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“Until then, only White people could be citizens of the United States with voting and other rights and privileges.” Incorrect. Only white men, women were still fighting for the right to vote. That did not happen until August 1920, with the ratification of the 19th amendment.
Good points Poke and Mable. According to some historians, the phrase ‘…all men are created equal…’in the Declaration of Independence did not mean individual men, but rather groups of men from the states could establish governments equal to those of other countries.
Individual equality of men didn’t come into play until the mid-late 1800’s. In any case none of those right applied only to white men: women of any race or color not included. The Constitution established rules and expectations for a slave-holding governmental state. The Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, who like some of the other signers, was a slave owner. Here’s a website on the subject. (I can almost understand some of it.) : https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/07/01/meaning-declaratnce-changed-time/
Minority rights come slowly, including women’s rights, long after laws are passed. It’s still difficult for some people who have the legal right to vote get to, due to other circumstances that exist today like lack of transportation to polling places, time off work, groups of people who physically interfere at polling places, with poll workers, and more. When I was a child in the South, the polling places were in rich, white women’s homes, where Black people could traditionally enter only by the back door if at all, which meant people of color were unable to cast their ballots. And during the Vietnam War, when husbands MIA (Missing in Action) but not declared dead, some wives in the mid-west, possibly other places, could not sell their homes. In fact, some wives could not legally sign permission for their children to go on school field trips as men had jurisdiction in such matters. Ah, we have a ways to go for equality for all. To say nothing of financial and social equality. How many people of color live on Orcas Island today?