“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.”

Does this mean the US is the dumpster for all the unwanted in the world to come here and collect welfare, foodstamps, and Medicaid. When they do work they will pay no income taxes for seven years. Get this off of the Statue of Liberty.

When the Statue of Liberty was built, nobody had any thought of adding on Emma Lazarus' little quotation. It was slapped on later, as an afterthought.

Personally, I've never been particularly fond of that statement. It implies that the only people who came here from Europe were the leftovers who couldn't make it anywhere else. I think it's just the opposite. They were strong people who found themselves unable to exercise their full potential in a feudal caste system and came here to get away from all that. In the process, they created a nation that quickly overcame, and now outshines by a wide margin, their antecedent "homelands" in the Old World.

I prefer the description attributed to Kit Carson: "The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way".

That I could rate this with innumerable stars a countless number of times. Understanding that we are all brothers and sisters, heirs to the same Father, I throw open my arms and say join me in your search for the law of nature and of nature's God and the liberty that harmonizes there with. My eternal family that has been reduced to huddled masses, made poor by despotic tyrants, and are tired from dragging heavy chains of oppression, WELCOME TO LIBERTY ! ! ! - here, you can breathe free. The lamp of liberty burns brightly, lighting the way to the golden door.

It is a tragedy beyond words that the occupying statist theocracy now infesting this land has so extinguished that nobly hoped for and sought after land of liberty. Those patrons of despotic socialism, now seek wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude more than the animating contest of freedom, all while crouching down and licking the hands which feed them - having abandon such posterity of liberty. Those tranquil patrons of despotic socialism that would rationalize the theft of the noble laborer's fruit and the granting a dole from that stolen booty only to a select few have lost sight of the worth of a soul only to fixate on the greed of the unlawful / unconstitutional system.

I had forgotten who wrote the lines - thanks