"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"
About this Quote
The line doesn’t plead; it recruits. Emma Lazarus turns the Statue of Liberty into a speaker with a job description: not simply to welcome, but to invert the moral hierarchy of nations. “Tired” and “poor” aren’t embarrassments to be managed; they’re credentials. The phrase “huddled masses” is deliberately unglamorous, stripping away the romantic immigrant myth before it even forms. What follows - “yearning to breathe free” - supplies the oxygen: not prosperity, not adventure, but the basic right to live uncompressed by persecution and caste.
The rhetoric works because it’s both intimate and imperial. “Give me” is a possessive verb, a bold demand addressed to the Old World, as if America can afford to be picky and chooses the rejected. That audacity is the point. Lazarus, writing in 1883 as nativist sentiment rose and as Jewish refugees fled Russian pogroms, isn’t describing a settled national identity; she’s trying to author one. The sonnet “The New Colossus” was part of a fundraising effort for the Statue’s pedestal, but the poem’s real fundraising is moral: it asks Americans to invest in a self-image built on refuge.
Subtextually, it’s also a dare. If liberty is the brand, the customer base can’t be limited to the already comfortable. The line’s genius is how it makes exclusion sound like a betrayal, not a policy choice - turning immigration from an economic debate into a test of national character.
The rhetoric works because it’s both intimate and imperial. “Give me” is a possessive verb, a bold demand addressed to the Old World, as if America can afford to be picky and chooses the rejected. That audacity is the point. Lazarus, writing in 1883 as nativist sentiment rose and as Jewish refugees fled Russian pogroms, isn’t describing a settled national identity; she’s trying to author one. The sonnet “The New Colossus” was part of a fundraising effort for the Statue’s pedestal, but the poem’s real fundraising is moral: it asks Americans to invest in a self-image built on refuge.
Subtextually, it’s also a dare. If liberty is the brand, the customer base can’t be limited to the already comfortable. The line’s genius is how it makes exclusion sound like a betrayal, not a policy choice - turning immigration from an economic debate into a test of national character.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus" (sonnet, 1883); the lines are from this poem and are inscribed on a bronze plaque in the Statue of Liberty pedestal. |
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