Rash: Don’t dim America’s ‘beacon of hope’

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“Give me your tired, your poor, / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” were words once welcoming the world to America. They’re from the poem posted at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” which ends: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Tragically, for both the huddled masses and those who can already breathe free in America, the golden door is increasingly leaden due to Trump administration policies backed by the Supreme Court, including a recent ruling that greenlit the administration’s red light to humanitarian parole protections for more than 500,000 migrants from four beleaguered Latin American nations: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This comes after the court agreed to the revocation of temporary legal status for about 350,000 Venezuelans under a separate Biden-era program.

“This is a pattern we have seen with this administration, which is to roll back programs that have been extended to people who are not citizens but have been extended to people in a temporary capacity to allow them to come to the United States,” said Julia Decker, policy director for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.

These countries’ conditions, said Decker, are still dire and dangerous on a general and often individual level. There is “a lot of evidence that there’s a lot of instability; there are a lot of conditions that are going to be particularly dangerous and create a lot of risks for folks if they are forced to return.”

While there are higher concentrations of people under protected status from other countries in other programs residing in Minnesota, according to census data provided by the Minnesota State Demographic Center, there are between 6,000-7,000 individuals in this state born in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, with some portion potentially affected by the court order.

“The broader picture here,” said Decker, “is that as we see these rollbacks of temporary programs, we’re also seeing a rollback of just protection generally for people who are facing all sorts of risks and harms, both general instability, poverty and violence, but also personalized risks that under both international and U.S. refugee and asylum law should be grounds for asylum claims, refugee claims, and yet are not.” And that, added Decker, “is a sharp departure from that sort of baseline principle.”

This sharp departure “is a bad decision for U.S. foreign-policy and national-security interests, it’s a terrible decision for basic concerns about fairness and humanity, and it’s a very bad decision for the future of Minnesota” in part because of the state’s need for immigrants, said professor Eric Schwartz, chair of the Humphrey School’s global policy area.

Schwartz, a former Humphrey School dean, president of Refugees International, and U.S. assistant secretary of state for Population, Refugees and Migration in the Obama administration among other roles, said that the migrants from the four countries coming under the program came legally in “an ordered manner that the United States could easily absorb, and we communicated with the full authority of the United States to these people that they could come with some expectation of being here for some considerable period of time. And based on those expectations, people gave up the little they had at home and took advantage of this opportunity for legal and authorized migration.”

To “terminate it and basically say to half a million people that you’ve got to go back to wretched conditions in circumstances when you’ve given up much if not all that you had [is] just cruel,” Schwartz said. “There’s no other way to describe it — that’s just gratuitously nasty and cruel.”

It would have been unimaginable for previous presidents to do the same to Hungarians in 1956 after their uprising, Cubans in the 1960s and beyond after Castro’s rise, or Soviet Jews or Vietnamese refugees, Schwartz said, adding: “In each and every one of those cases, the administration used the authority of parole” that the Biden administration did with Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.

“For decades, no matter how inconsistent some of our policies around the border have been,” Schwartz concluded, “the United States has been seen as a beacon of hope, a beacon of tolerance and inclusion and respect for the basic rights and decency of people, and it has enabled us the moral authority to exercise leadership around the world.”

This, he continued, is a “comparative advantage” over China, Russia and repressive regimes. “What is the distinguishing element of what we bring to the global conversation? It’s always been a fundamental respect to the basic rights of individuals, whether they are individuals who are American citizens or whether they are individuals who are living under tyranny abroad or whether they are individuals who are seeking the protection and asylum in the United States.”

Fundamentally, “who are we? What do we stand for?” Schwartz asked. “I don’t think we have a compelling answer to that question right now.”

Lazarus did. The colossus she evoked was “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,” but “A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name / Mother of Exiles.”

The definition of “colossus” can go beyond a giant statue to signify “a person or thing of immense size or power,” according to Merriam-Webster. Like the size and power of the idea and ideals of America, immortalized by Lazarus in language that includes: “From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome.”