“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!”
Those words, from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” sit on the bronze plaque placed in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903.¹
Donald Trump has spent years answering that invitation with a sorting rule.
Haitians, he said, were “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats,” and “eating the pets.” Haiti was a “shithole country.” Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” Haitian immigration was “like a death wish for our country.” Haitians and others were “poisoning the blood” of America. And when Trump wanted to explain who should come instead, he supplied the contrast himself: why take people from “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”²
Justice Elena Kagan saw the implication immediately. She wrote the sentence the majority would not: “Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.)”²
Nor was Haiti the only target. Trump said Somalis “contribute nothing” and that “we don’t want them in our country.” He described Syrian refugees as “definitely … in many cases, ISIS-aligned” and warned that they would be “the great Trojan horse.”³
Stephen Miller supplied the bureaucratic version. In leaked emails, Miller referred to “immigration to replace existing demographics.”⁴
That is the record behind yesterday’s immigration rulings. Not a clean policy debate. Not a neutral argument about administrative housekeeping.