… 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!
– Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” (the poem on the Statue of Liberty)
As alleged patriots devise ways to deny the humanity of young Central American refugees seeking asylum in the United States, it’s worth remembering not only Emma Lazarus‘ famous poem, but this PSA from Superman – that all-American refugee from the planet Krypton.
We should judge a country according to how it treats the most vulnerable of its residents – be they citizens or refugees. Though some Americans have reached out to these latest immigrants, others have shouted racist slurs, demanded their deportation, or threatened to kill them.
The United States prides itself on being “a nation of immigrants,” a claim that is (at best) dubious, given that (a) Native Americans have lived here before Europeans arrived and (b) many African “immigrants” were in fact kidnapped and enslaved. However, the noble idea of embracing people from different cultural and national backgrounds is supposed to be part of what defines America. It’s supposed to be a core American value. I’m posting this comic page as a reminder of that (sometimes) shared ethos.