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TRANSCRIPT Welcoming the Stranger?: Religion & the Politics of Immigration Dr. Peter Skerry Boston College Dr. John Green University of Akron November 2013 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Today’s topic, as you know, could not be more timely, and we’re delighted about that because we want our topics to be timely, and this one certainly is. And we have two gentlemen who are political scientists who are experts on the subject. Their biographies are in your pamphlets. You both know them by reputation. We’re going to first hear from Dr. Peter Skerry, Professor of Political Science at Boston College, giving us kind of an overview of history of immigration in American politics and life and why different people look at it different ways. And then we’re going to have Dr. John Green from the University of Akron, who many of us feel is the leading political demographer of religious voting behavior in America on almost any topic. And John is going to talk to us about the different way religious groups view immigration questions. DR. PETER SKERRY: Thank you, Mike. It’s great to be here today. I appreciate the invitation and all the help from you and your staff to make this really a pleasant and, I think, a rewarding couple of days. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to look at, for a few minutes, assumptions that I see informing the views of religious leaders across the board — we could talk about specific religious leaders later if you like — about immigration. And it’s not as though these religious leaders’ views, I think, are so distinctive from other elites, but that is the topic on the table, so that’s what I’m going to focus on. And the real TRANSCRIPT “Welcoming the Stranger?: Religion & the Politics of Immigration” Dr. Peter Skerry and Dr. John Green November 2013 thrust of my remarks is that these assumptions typically don’t bear up under scrutiny, whether we’re looking at immigration in the past or in the present. The three assumptions, just to lay them out quickly, are that immigrants are typically the poorest, and therefore the neediest, segments of the societies whence they come. We all know there are high-skilled immigrants, but the discourse is always focusing on immigrants who are the poorest and the neediest. The second assumption is that, typically, no meaningful distinctions get drawn between immigrants and refugees, or the differences between immigrants and refugees get confounded and muddled all the time. And the third assumption that gets made by religious as well as other leaders is that those arriving here intend to stay here and become Americans. Now, not coincidentally, these assumptions are embedded in Emma Lazarus’ famous sonnet, “The New Colossus,” which I will now inflict upon you. Just to remind us: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “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 2 TRANSCRIPT “Welcoming the Stranger?: Religion & the Politics of Immigration” Dr. Peter Skerry and Dr. John Green November 2013 We’ve all heard these words. Yet they’re really misleading. This sonnet and these assumptions are now entwined with the image, of course, of the Statue of Liberty, where these words are found at the main entrance to the statue. Now, we’re clearly in the realm of myths and symbols at this point, which understandably suffuse the topic of immigration, which is obviously integral to our self-understanding as a nation and a people. Symbols like the Statue of Liberty are particularly powerful, but they’re also changeable and protean, and that’s what I want to talk about for a few minutes. After all, at its origins, as many of you may know, the statue had nothing to do with immigration. Rather, it was a gift conceived by embattled French republicans in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. During the 1870s, they were trying to appeal to their fellow and more successful republicans across the Atlantic. Liberty’s torch was intended not to light the way for immigrants to come into America, but to send out rays of hope to inspire republicans around the globe to foster free and liberal institutions where they lived. But, of course, the statue’s dedication in 1886 coincided with a growing influx of immigrants arriving into New York Harbor who felt themselves literally greeted by Liberty’s torch, and it became part of immigrant lore and part of our national story. Then, too, Emma Lazarus’ sonnet had an important role to play in this transformation of the statue’s image. It was originally written for an art exhibit that was undertaken to raise money for the statue’s pedestal, but then it contributed to the confusion — the sonnet did — up to this day, between immigrants and refugees, the second of those three assumptions that I highlighted at the beginning of my remarks. What Emma Lazarus is talking about there is a refugee story, not an immigrant story: people who were forced out of where they live and who came to America for refuge. I’ll have more to say about this in a minute. And this was no accident, that Lazarus was moved to write about this. She was responding to the plight of her fellow Jews — she being a particularly assimilated American Jew — 3 TRANSCRIPT “Welcoming the Stranger?: Religion & the Politics of Immigration” Dr. Peter Skerry and Dr. John Green November 2013 but she was responding to the plight of her fellow Jews fleeing pogroms in Tsarist Russia at the time. In any event, at the time of the statue’s 50th anniversary in 1936, Lazarus’ sonnet was displayed in a very obscure place inside the pediment on the second story beneath the statue, and the public was barely aware of it. In a ceremony at the statue in 1936, President Roosevelt did not even mention Lazarus’ sonnet, though he did mention immigration, rather tangentially, and mostly to say that it was a thing of the past. As he put it, “We have within our shores today the materials out of which we shall continue to build an even better home for liberty.” But the story was that the door had more or less shut. It was not until a few years later, with the plight of Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, that Lazarus’ work really began to receive serious attention, undoubtedly fueled in part by our less-than-generous response to those in need of refuge. And in this way, the statue came to be confounded as the symbol of welcome to immigrants seeking opportunity and advancement (which was the immigrants’ story coming into New York Harbor) but especially at the same time to refugees fleeing danger and persecution, especially during World War II. So this brings us up to those three key assumptions underlying the understanding of immigrants, broadly construed, among our religious leaders — that first assumption, again, that those arriving here are typically the poorest of the poor. As Lazarus put it, “your tired, your poor.” But as economic historians Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, among lots of other scholars, have pointed out, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the poorest of the poor were seldom the ones who migrated here. Rather, it was those one or two strata above the poorest, those with the wherewithal to be aware of opportunities to migrate, probably those who were literate, and who had the means to plan and save for passage to the United States. Today, putting aside the obvious fact that many educated and skilled individuals seek to come here, at the other end of the spectrum it’s still not the poorest of the poor who 4 TRANSCRIPT “Welcoming the Stranger?: Religion & the Politics of Immigration” Dr. Peter Skerry and Dr. John Green November 2013 migrate here, but those of modest means, nevertheless able to save and to afford the opportunity costs of not working while making the trek here and then to pay the substantial fees charged by a smuggler (or “coyote”) to gain entrance into the United States. Now, maybe some fine-tuning is in order in this story. It’s gotten to be the case that in Mexico, at least, coming to the United States is part of a routine, sometimes almost a rite of passage in many villages in Central Mexico and in some cities. The costs and risks of the journey are hardly negligible, but they’re greatly relatively lower than when the migration first began many years ago. The second assumption that gets made by our religious leaders is that immigrants are equivalent to refugees and that the circumstances that have driven and continue to drive immigrants here are not fundamentally different than those confronting refugees — the “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” in the sonnet. So as I’ve suggested, Lazarus’ powerful imagery has contributed to this confusion, but so have the needs of politicians and advocates striving to build coalitions, who have minimized or ignored the differences between refugees confronted with few choices and economic migrants choosing to come here.

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