It is news to absolutely no one that the recent issuance of an executive order by Donald Trump has caused quite a stir worldwide. Alongside many of the recent injustices he has begun to commit with his pen and his trusty cabinet, this ban on travel into the nation for the nationals of seven predominantly Muslim countries is the most explicitly inhumane.
There are too many Americans who don’t know what this nation is about. They think it is for “them,” though they don’t truly accept the fact that there is no clear definition of an American. What I can present to you, however, is an idea so valued by the America of days gone by that it is inscribed at the base of our very own Statue of Liberty.
The poem at the base of the statue, “The New Colossus,” was written in 1883 by a woman by the name of Emma Lazarus who was a descendant of German and Portuguese immigrants of the Jewish faith. If one simply reads this poem, you would be shocked to see some of the altruism that has long since been abandoned by this country.
“Mother of Exiles,” is the first phrase on the sixth line—referencing the statue and the nation itself. Yet, the most important and least headed lines come next: “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.”
Today, however, far too many of us have turned our backs on the huddled masses. Far too many of us have tried not to worry ourselves with the problems of the tempest-tost. Far too many of us have the absolutely absurd assertion that there is some inherent quality withheld in the status of refugee that makes a person or a people less desirable, or somehow more troublesome. People don’t want them to “take their jobs,” “bomb their schools,” “increase crime rates” — but still have the nerve to claim they are kind because they donate money to their own church. Turn your nose away from reality, and you fail the truest of tests — mostly because of your own ignorance and prejudice.
It is with great chagrin that the admission must now be made that there are a group of these same folks in the oval office. What makes them detestable, however,is their unwillingness to be honest or realistic about their intentions and the consequences which they entail. If they would like to behave as though they were a petty rag-tag gang of ill informed children, they should only say so; I would respect them more for their admission. What I cannot respect, however, are their shallow attempts to justify their impetuosity.
They, like so many others who are blind to the soul of our land of immigrants and refugees, have no wish to welcome this group of people which they have marginalized to such an immense degree. They fear that which they do not understand, that which makes sense to them, that which is so simple, it must be the root of the problem. They see no farther than Islam. They ban it, and then try their hand at some diplomatic jargon — the likes of which they are quite poorly versed at — in an attempt to make their actions seem far more rationally motivated than prejudiced.
Yet, just as we would expect them to do, they spill the beans from time to time. These moments provide me with glee. Whether it’s “alternative facts” or divisive “camera angles,” they will always show their babbling undersides in the end.
In the case of this detestable ban, let us call upon the recently uttered words of the former mayor of New York, Rudy. W. Giuliani. In a recent interview with Fox News over the ban that “is about danger, not race or religion,” the former politician and Trump supporter let his carefully unmeasured words fly.
When host Jeanine Pirro asked how, exactly, the president decided which nations to ban immigration from, Giuliani retorted, “I’ll tell you the whole history of it. So when [Trump] first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban.’ He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.’” He continued, “And what we did was, we focused on, instead of religion, danger — the areas of the world that create danger for us.” He attempted to finish off by saying that the ban was not based on religion, but on the places that are sending terrorists to the United States.
There we have it, ladies and gentlemen. In a nation devoid of altruism, we now have people attempting to mask marginalization as being beneficial to humankind. Never mind hardship, never mind pain, never mind suffering, they simply make us too uncomfortable because we judge them all the same. This isn’t a new concept in history, yet it’s still far too few of us pick up on it when it happens right in front of us. For a man to say he was given a goal, and accomplished that goal, but that somehow that goal which he accomplished is different than the one he was given, is truly a faltering of logic.
Let us not fall for this. Let us try to remember what this nation is, the means by which it was made and the role which “those” from “elsewhere” played in it.
Jordan Marcell is a 20-year-old English and studio art sophomore from Geismar, Louisiana.