This poem by Emma Lazarus does not mean our immigration policy is to let any and all comers come in unvetted simply because they are poor, tired and huddled. It was never meant to advocate an open borders policy.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/19283...rty-promote-immigration-dumb-elliott-hamilton
Here is one commenters thoughts:
My Bachelor's Degree is in History. Somehow I missed the law passed by Congress and signed by the President that gave Poets control over US Immigration Policy. Perhaps Acosta can point out to me when and how that happened?
Why attacking poets and trying to make a point no one is arguing is dumb: because you'll look goofy and no one is arguing it, respectively.
Now a great deal of what our founders put together was fairly poetic in the course of things. The Declaration of Independence is a rhetorically wonderful bit of writing, with or without legal force. Many of the documents we honor as a nation, a great deal of the national sentiment and expectation, aren't reduced to something as dry as the law must be, but those thoughts guide that law, support it like bone.
And the law, often as not, reflects our aspirations and our highest ideas. When it fails to do that, outside of the pragmatic and mundane (like traffic court) it tends to find itself challenged and undone in time, by process (see: Suffrage/Civil Rights Movement) or by some other means (see: the Civil War).
The poem noted in its relation to the Statue of Liberty is one of the aspiration variety. It was nobler than popular sentiment when written. Apparently it's nobler today as well. Then again, we've always had a problem with the new guy and the Irish found that out the hard way, as did the Italians, as have most minorities. But despite our worst impulses and resistance we've kept moving toward and fighting for better ideas. That's one thing that distinguishes our social experiment from most. We aren't a noble people, never have been. But we've always dreamed of being and at our best our laws and our poems reflect that impulse, that hope.
That, as I'm prone to say, ain't hay.