"huddled masses"

Stephen Dinan writes in the Washington Times,

The same year that Emma Lazarus‘ poem welcoming the world’s “poor” and “huddled masses” was added to the Statue of Liberty, the U.S. government rejected 5,812 of those same new arrivals for being poor.

In his annual report to Congress in 1903, U.S. Immigration Commissioner William Williams warned that too many immigrants were “entering this country with inadequate sums of money,” leaving the system with thousands of charity cases and sinking the country’s standard of living.

More than a century later, the debate between those who subscribe to Lazarus‘ optimistic view and those who take Williams‘ more cautious approach to immigration is playing out again — this time over the Trump administration’s rules looking to discourage immigrants who are likely to end up on the public dole.

Read more here.