Newswise — There’s a good reason Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus,” are inscribed on a bronze plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

The poem, written in 1883, is an annunciation to the world that here, in America, the world’s unwanted have a home. Here, there is opportunity, promise and compassion. The poem’s most famous lines are its last:

“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!”

In no uncertain terms: here is a refuge for all the world’s refugees. And the descendants of refugees in the United States are many.

“All refugees are immigrants, but not all immigrants are refugees,” said Leonard Greenspoon, Creighton University professor and Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization. “Still, it seems likely that a lot of us might be here in the United States as a result of people who we might today consider to be refugees.”

Even those immigrants who left their home countries under no particular political duress, Greenspoon said, could be said to be fleeing something — economic hardship, agricultural catastrophe, the realization that there was simply nothing left for them in the Old World.

Given the present climate of anti-refugee rhetoric issuing from the mouths of presidential candidates and other politicians, Greenspoon said he feels like some segment of the nation has lost sight of its immigrant and refugee roots. The vituperation has ramped up in the face of perceived threats abroad from terrorist organizations like the so-called Islamic State and the terrorist attacks in Paris earlier this month, with some going so far as to say a religious test might be in order for those seeking asylum in the U.S., most of whom are Muslim refugees fleeing civil war in Syria.

“The fact that prominent people are advocating not accepting individuals on the basis of religion, is a huge step backwards,” Greenspoon said. “It strikes me as inherently un-American, if not inhuman. To base that sort of decision on one’s religious faith or lack thereof, it really seems like we are living in another time.”

That time, Greenspoon said, is the not so distant past of the 1930s and 1940s, when the U.S. engaged in another vehement debate about to whom the nation would grant refugee status. Then, the religious animosity arose from an entrenched anti-Semitism.

In January 1939, a poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion, asked respondents their feelings on a proposal for the U.S. to accept 10,000 refugee children from Germany, most of them Jewish. By the time of the poll, Jews in Germany had already faced four years of restrictions under the Nuremberg Laws and the November 1938 events of Kristallnacht commenced open violence on the Jewish population. All the same, 61 percent of respondents said the government should not allow the children to come to America.

In April 1939, another poll in Fortune magazine asked: “If you were a member of Congress, would you vote yes or no on a bill to open the doors of the United States to a larger number of European refugees than now are admitted under our immigration quota?” Portioning out the answers by the respondents’ religion proved shocking: 84 percent of Roman Catholics and 85.3 percent of Protestants answered “No” on the question. Of Jewish respondents, nearly 70 percent said they would allow more refugees.

The U.S. had a chance to practically apply its prejudices in June 1939 — three months before the onset of World War II — when a German ship carrying nearly 1,000 German Jews, the M.S. St. Louis, attempted to land in Florida, but was turned away. The St. Louis had also been refused entry in Cuba and would also be blocked from entering Canada before returning to Europe. The United Kingdom agreed to take some of the refugees, but the majority returned to Antwerp, Belgium, and 227 of the St. Louis passengers would not survive World War II.

Despite that disastrous chapter in American history, the U.S. still did not seem to appreciate the lesson. And the latest bellicosity over Syrian refugees isn’t an isolated incident.

David Weber, J.D., associate dean for academic affairs at the Creighton School of Law, said sometimes the lines of the Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty can ring hollow, given the American track record when it comes to refugees.

“There is a lot of echoing what we’ve seen in the past,” said Weber, who teaches immigration law. “Really, the only thing that’s changed is the identity of the refugees. The concept of disliking refugees is fairly constant and the thread that seems to tie it all together is that, in the abstract, we always say we’re OK with taking refugees, as long as none want to come in. Then, when we get the largest human migration crisis since World War II, now we have concerns — terrorism, safety, security.”

In his immigration law class this semester, Weber and his students are exploring the plight of refugee populations seeking asylum in the U.S., and reaching some dour conclusions.

In addition to the widespread refusal of Jewish refugees during the 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. also registered a 62 percent disapproval rate in a 1979 CBS/New York Times poll on accepting refugees fleeing the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In a 1984 poll, a majority of Americans thought the U.S. should be accepting fewer refugees across the board and also felt refugees were a drain on the economy and government. And in 1993, as tens of thousands of Haitians attempted to bolt from a vicious dictatorship, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed 63 percent of Americans disapproved of granting Haitians asylum.

“We look at what happened with the St. Louis and say, ‘That’s a shameful passage in our history,’” Weber said. “But I ask my students, ‘What beats shame? Anger and fear.’ That’s always going to win and that’s what you see dominating the debate today: anger and fear.”

And, as with the refusal of Jewish refugees, much of the anger and fear is being couched in religious rhetoric, this time of an anti-Islamic stripe. Talk of a registry for non-Christian refugees has surfaced.

“The United States does have a history of allowing asylum claims more easily if you’re Christian,” Weber said. “That’s just a fact of the past. A registry immediately makes me think of internment camps for Japanese-Americans in World War II, or what happened in Nazi Germany.”

Both Weber and Greenspoon said what’s likely to play out in the U.S. is a bombastic political debate settling nothing and deferring the refugee question until most of asylum-seekers are settled elsewhere. In the meantime, arguments will persist along the lines of balancing humanitarian concerns with the potential for even a small segment of refugees to participate in terrorist acts.

“We will paralyze ourselves into inaction,” Greenspoon said. “In this country, we have a wonderful judicial system that says you’re innocent until proven guilty. It’s too bad we don’t seem to want to extend that to refugees. Maybe it’s just called self-preservation because the risk that you let 10,000 people in and one of them turns out to be engaged in something like terrorism seems like our moral fiber has gone down to nothing. We’ve ruled out any possible value or virtue in accepting refugees.”

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