HitRed wrote:Btw, are Humans native to Europe or immigrants from Africa?
Yeah, ultimately we're all descended from immigrants from Africa.
HitRed wrote:As a historical note the "Give me your..." was added decades after the Statue of Liberty was built. Never envisioned by the original builder.
The poem itself may have been of more recent origin, but the sentiment behind it was not new.
Open-door immigration was what fueled the growth of the U.S., every step of the way.
Even before it became the U.S., actually. The French and the Spanish came to North America before the British. One of the big reasons why the British colonies outperformed the French and Spanish ones was the open door. While the French and Spanish tried to preserve special status for their own citizens, the British didn't care where you came from. Everyone was welcome to come and do business in the British colonies -- Brits, French, Dutch, German, Swedes, Slavs of various kinds, Italians, Africans (not just slaves but freedmen too), even Arabs and Turks. These colonies thrived while their more ethnically-restricted French and Spanish counterparts stagnated.
That open door was carried on after the colonies gained their independence, and succeeding waves of immigration continued to reinvigorate the nation whenever it threatened to stagnate. Europe, Africa, and Asia have all contributed to making America a superpower. Visas are originally just a tax measure -- a way for bureaucrats to make sure they got their palms greased when someone crossed the borders. This new attitude that needing a visa should be some kind of monstrous hurdle that we should have to cross is a relatively new thing. Even when I was a kid, both Canada and the U.S. were both proud of the fact that they were open-door nations. It's only in the last 20 or 30 years that this selfish concept arose, that we should deny these benefits to future generations.
Open-door immigration is what made America great. If someone was genuinely concerned about Making America Great Again, he would be enthused about stopping this tendency towards paranoid provincialism and throwing a welcoming door open to the world once again.