Today's Liberal News

Benjamin F. Jones

What Emma Lazarus Got Wrong About Immigration

Americans have long worried that immigrants will take their jobs. Henry Cabot Lodge, who championed restrictive immigration laws as a U.S. senator, described foreign-born workers in 1891 as a “great reservoir of cheap labor” that was “constantly pulling down the wages of the working people.”Emma Lazarus, a contemporary of Lodge, presented a different point of view.