As Emma Lazarus tells us in her 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” our American immigrants are welcomed by a woman, the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles.
When Art and his mother arrived in Connecticut in 1978, I can imagine that they were tired. Traveling across the ocean with a four-year-old would be tiring for anyone, immigrant or not. They were poor. Yearning to breathe free of Communist control.
America was not supposed to be a father who looked down his nose at their broken English. America was supposed to be a mother who gathered them to her home.
“The New Colossus” was mounted on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal in 1903, during a monumental, decades-long wave of immigration to the United States. Three years later, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a team of doctors removed the adenoids of a group of Eastern European immigrant students in Public School 110, en masse. Given medical understanding at the time, doctors were concerned that the adenoids were impeding the students’ breathing and thus learning, so they sent home permission slips (some of which parents signed with a letter X), and then they cut out the adenoids of 83 children in 88 minutes. The children were given ice cream to celebrate.
The relationship between the medical establishment and the immigrant community has often been fraught. Parents were not convinced that the procedure had been necessary, especially those parents whose kids returned from school with bloody mouths. Like a phrase in a game of telephone, the news of the adenoidectomies that June became garbled with each retelling, until many families in the crowded Lower East Side tenements were afraid that school officials were poised to slit their children’s throats. A Jewish mother from Poland at that time might have come to Manhattan to escape Russian persecution—the Białystok pogroms earlier that month had killed almost 100 residents, in fact, many women and children. It was not beyond reason to fear that the authorities might murder schoolchildren.
So, on June 28, the mothers revolted. Several thousand women marched on twelve public schools, throwing rocks and vegetables, and screaming for the children’s release. School staff were attacked, the police were called, someone pulled out a pistol, and the crowd calmed only when the children were brought outside so that their parents could see them whole and well and gather their babies to their arms. These were the Adenoid Riots of 1906.
It’s hard enough to see your kid operated on in a modern facility with minimal risk; I can’t imagine sending my child to school and worrying she might have her throat sliced open in a surgery we didn’t choose. I would have protested, too. Now, worrying that she might be huddled in the corner of her classroom with her friends while an American teen armed with an AR-15 swaggers down the halls of her school? That one I can imagine. Worrying that my daughter’s Mexican friends down the street will be playing hopscotch outside with their little dog when ICE comes to arrest their mom? That one I can also imagine.
For obvious reasons, my husband doesn’t go to any protests these days. But I do, given the endless number of worries in 2025. I take H with me. We make our own signs, and I try to explain what other people’s handmade signs mean, those colorful pleas and warnings.
Your ancestors were immigrants too
Protect kids not guns
Crush ICE Not Dreams
Keep hate out of healthcare
If Jesus returned, Trump would deport him
Stop tearing families apart
They’re almost like modern-day versions of the prophet Isaiah’s words: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.”
I suppose these times are not as unprecedented as we think. There is always something to protest. Always someone powerful deciding what can be taken.
Always an us and a them.
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